


Sanctuary

by FabulaRasa



Category: DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-08-05 07:59:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 96,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16363970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FabulaRasa/pseuds/FabulaRasa
Summary: Sometimes your best enemy becomes your best friend, and that's always (if you're Hal Jordan) weird as fuck.





	1. Chapter 1

“Hey,” Hal said, as Bruce sat down beside him. He had arrived at the park early, because he needed to be sitting down when Bruce got there, for obvious reasons. Bruce just gave a grunt, probably expressive of what he thought about morning meetings. It wasn’t even that early, but it probably still counted as night to that nocturnal motherfucker. He was hidden behind shades like some hungover vampire. 

“Brought you coffee,” Hal said cheerily, handing him a venti of pure black sludge. Bruce grunted again, which was maybe meant to be thank you. Their bench was facing the fountain, but the park was deserted at this hour, except for one little girl toddling along the path on the other side, a grandparent in tow. 

“So thanks for meeting me,” Hal said. 

“I was up anyway,” Bruce said, his voice even raspier than usual. 

“Rough night?”

“It’s fine. What did you want to meet about?”

Hal chewed on his lip a minute. The truth was, he had not quite worked out the launch phrase. He had quite a few of the bits in the middle worked out, and several turns of phrase he was pleased with toward the end. But the cold open was the part he had not exactly worked out, and Bruce’s morning gruffness was not making it easier. He should have asked to meet later in the day. But his day was only going to get busier, and this was when it had needed to happen, so fuck it.

“It’s League business,” Hal said.

“Obviously. You mind telling me what is so important I need to sit on a frozen park bench at this ungodly hour?”

“I’m sick,” Hal said, because weeks of thinking about this, fucking weeks, and that was apparently the best he could do. A-plus. “And not in the bronchitis kind of way. I’m going to need to withdraw from the League, and this was a conversation that needed to happen sooner rather than later.”

Bruce was silent, his face unreadable behind his shades. Hal sipped his coffee and watched the little girl. 

“Sick how,” Bruce said, and Hal was relieved to note there was no change in Bruce’s voice, and no sympathy in it. 

“Well, on the spectrum from ingrown toenail to terminal cancer, I’d put it at about a seven. I’m not dying, is what I mean. I have. . . it’s a weird kind of thing. There’s a kind of muscular dystrophy that affects joints and connective tissue as well as muscle, and it’s—that’s what I’ve got. It’s called Marchand’s Syndrome, which sounds like the title of one of those airport thrillers about a pandemic in the Bay area. Like the one where they have to catch some kid’s pet monkey to build the anti-toxin or something. No, that was an actual book, wasn’t it, what was it called?”

“Hot Zone,” Bruce said, and Hal fell silent, because he had been babbling. He drank more coffee and tried to steady his hands. 

“I know what Marchand’s is,” Bruce said. Because of course he did, and all of a sudden Hal wanted to laugh – he just had this image of Bruce staying up late, WebMD on the giant computer screen in the cave while he scrolled obsessively through obscure diseases.

“That’s weird,” Hal said. “Like eleven people in the world have it, so it’s just weird you know what it is, that’s all. Anyway, I’m one of the lucky eleven I guess. In a lot of ways it’s just like regular MD. Your average amount of pain and weakness, and eventually my skeleton will more or less fall apart, but until then, here I am. For now, I’m mainly just tired, is the thing. That’s how I knew that. . . I’m mainly just tired. So yeah. That’s. . . that’s my news, I guess. I was diagnosed a couple of months ago, but I didn’t—it wasn’t really clear how things were gonna go, or how fast things were going to. . . progress. That’s why I was waiting to talk to you about the League, because I didn’t really know if things were going to. . . get worse.”

“But they have,” Bruce said quietly.

“Yep.”

Bruce was nodding. He would already be calculating the ways this was going to affect the League, how they were going to compensate. “I know you’re worried about the League,” Hal said, “but it’s going to be fine. The Corps already knows, and I’m off active duty right now, but they’re going to be sending a replacement Lantern—” and thank whatever God existed that his voice was nice and steady on that one, just the way he had practiced it – “or more likely more than one, and they should be contacting the League when they’re in this system, so that will work out.”

“Believe it or not,” Bruce said, watching the little girl balance precariously on the rim of the fountain, “I wasn’t worried about the League.”

Her grandmother had caught up with her now, and had grabbed her hand to steady her. That was nice, Hal thought. The way she hadn’t just snatched the kid back, but had let her continue her adventures, just a little safer now. 

“May I ask a question?” Bruce said, and Hal shrugged.

“Sure, hit me.”

“How are you?”

It took him aback. There was a long list of things he had expected Bruce to say, questions he would ask, but this one for whatever reason had not occurred to him. He was unsure what to say. “Ahh. . . I. . . you know,” he fumbled. “There are. . . good days and bad days, I guess.”

“And which one is today?”

Hal studied the gravel at his feet. “Well it’s not one of the better ones,” he said lightly. “Listen, I. . . there’s something else I need to say. I may not have been. . . always the easiest person to get along with, in the League. I know that you and I have. . . had our differences, and yeah, I get that that was not all you, I have just enough self-awareness to realize that. But no matter what, I wanted you to know that I always really believed in what we were doing. In what you were doing. The League was your idea from the start, it was you, and the whole thing would never have gotten off the ground without you, and that was—it was really amazing to be a part of it. It was the best thing in my life actually. So thank you for that. It was. . . it was an honor to serve with you.”

Bruce’s impassive face behind his shades telegraphed nothing, and again Hal was grateful for that. Near as Hal could tell he was studying the shrubbery. Hal could never have gotten through any of this – especially that last bit – if he had detected any kind of pity from Bruce. He had counted on Bruce’s default sociopathy to make this easier, and Bruce had not disappointed. They fell back into silence. The grandmother had managed to interest the little girl in scooping out bugs from between the paving stones, and she was sitting now on the bench opposite theirs, on the other side of the fountain. The woman’s occasional suspicious glance their direction made it clear she thought they were up to no good. Some sort of early morning drug deal. Bruce’s trench and shades didn’t help with that. 

“Who have you told?” Bruce said.

“Ah, well, my doctor obviously knows. I’ve been seeing Leslie, in fact. That’s why I’m here in Gotham. It took a while to figure out what the hell was going on, so I ended up asking her for help, and yeah, she’s basically the reason anyone ever figured it out. So she knows, and I know. And I told my superiors in the Corps, obviously. But that’s—that’s it so far. You, me, and Leslie, in terms of humans, that is.”

“You haven’t told anyone,” Bruce said, and for the first time Hal heard something in his voice—like Hal had said something that had surprised him. 

“Not really. Like I said, at first I didn’t really know where things were going, and then afterward—I don’t know. I just haven’t gotten around to it, I guess.”

“Mm,” Bruce said, whatever that was supposed to mean. “Did you fly in from Coast City earlier this morning?”

“Yeah,” Hal said. 

“And we’re meeting in the morning because you’re going to be tied up at Gotham General with Leslie this afternoon.”

“Yeah, starting after lunch. More lab tests and things like that.”

Bruce’s head turned toward him for the first time. “And today is a bad day because you under-medicated. Because of this conversation.”

“Well call me crazy but I thought this would go better were I not high as balls.”

“As usual, Jordan, your judgment was for shit.” 

Hal tipped his head back against the bench and laughed so loud the grandmother pulled her purse closer. “Goddamn Spooky, stop trying to make me feel better, will you?”

Bruce’s mouth gave a twitch, behind his coffee. “Take your meds,” he said. “Conversation done. So go on and take them.”

“Yeah, I’m gonna. Just lemme finish my coffee. I’m gonna slam some serious narcotics and then crash over at the Best Western near the hospital until my appointment. You know what Gotham has that Coast City doesn’t? Donut delivery. Just found that out, last time I was here. There are like twelve shops that will deliver, right by Gotham General. Imma get high and eat donuts all day.”

Bruce swigged down the last of his coffee and tossed the dregs into a bush. “No you’re not,” he said. 

“Excuse me? I am a grown-up and I will eat two dozen chocolate chip banana bread with Nutella and peanut butter drizzle donuts if I fucking want to, so suck a dick.”

“You’re not going to a Best Western, is what I mean,” he said. “I’ll withhold judgment on the donuts. Come back with me to the Manor, where you can get some actual rest before your appointment, and some actual food if you feel like it. Alfred can drive you back for your appointment, or I can. But for now, you’re coming with me.”

“That’s—a very generous offer, but I’m—”

“It’s not an offer, and it’s not generous. It’s what is going to happen. Come on, my car is right over there.” He stood, and held out his hand. The hand startled Hal as much as anything. It meant Bruce knew that sitting on this bench had done some not-great things to Hal’s muscles, and getting up was probably going to be excruciating. Not that things had been great before; that was why he had arrived early, so Bruce wouldn’t see him have to ease onto a bench like he was fucking eighty years old. 

_We should talk about using a support_ , Leslie had said at their last appointment.

_You mean a cane._

_Or a brace_ , she had said, and he had puked a little in his mouth. _Just on the left side, for now. It would make things easier for you, and minimize the risk of falls._

He didn’t mind the idea of a cane or a brace or anything like that, not really. Using them wasn’t what he minded. It was never not using them, that was what he couldn’t choke down. Because that road had only one end, and at the end of it sat the inevitable wheelchair, the one he was probably going to end up in anyway, and if he started using something, he would never not use it. It would be the end of walking completely on his own, and he was not ready to be there yet. He had not been able to explain it to her. _I’m fine for now_ , was all he had said. 

But now there was Bruce’s hand, still extended in front of him. A kind of nakedness, to take hold of it. To let Bruce know how weak he was. Well. It was just Bruce, and Bruce didn’t give a shit. It wasn’t like Bruce could think worse of him. So he took the hand, and let himself use it to haul himself up, and congratulated himself on controlling the tremor in his arm as he did so. 

“My car is just over there,” Bruce said. He didn’t let go of Hal’s hand, but actually pulled it closer – tucked it into the crook of his arm, so Hal had no choice but to lean on it as they walked. Bench Grandma was clearly revising her opinion up from drug deal to prostitution ring. 

“I’m okay,” Hal said. 

“I know,” Bruce said easily. “So you haven’t talked to Carol. Has that been a problem?”

“What, you mean me not flying? Not really. I told her I needed to take a leave for a bit. I think she thinks it’s some kind of family thing. I’ll talk to her soon, but I wanted to do the League thing first. Hey will you—I mean, not that you would, but I just mean, in case it comes up or anything. Would you not say anything to anyone just yet? I’m not exactly—ready for all that, just yet.”

“I’ve elevated not sharing information to an art form, in case you hadn’t noticed. You can’t possibly imagine I’m going to share your business with anyone.” 

“Yeah, that’s fair. I guess you are pretty much a locked vault, huh. How is it that people don’t just talk to you all the time, about their deepest darkest secrets?”

“How do you know they don’t?” 

“Good point.”

“Fucking faggots,” a man walking past them on the sidewalk muttered. It was because Hal was still leaning on Bruce’s arm. 

“Nice city you got yourself here,” Hal said.

“The best. All right, here we are. You okay to get in?”

“Yeah, I got it from here. Hey out of curiosity, do you own any normal cars?”

“What are you talking about, this is a normal car.”

“Ah, no, Crazy Rich Whiteman, a Lotus is not a normal car. This is most emphatically not normal.”

“I activated the seat heaters some ten minutes ago, they ought to be ready now.”

“You’re right, the car is perfect,” Hal said. He groaned as he eased himself in, every muscle in his body relaxing at the spreading heat seeping into his bones. The buttery leather felt soft as a cloud, supporting his aches in all the right places. He sighed. “Jesus Christ I think I’m gonna cum.”

“Please don’t, this upholstery costs three times your salary.”

“You’re a pus-oozing cock-knob, you know that.”

“I do, in fact,” he said, as he pulled out onto West Park. Hal let himself sink back into the seat—and the support, how was that even possible, that a car seat could be giving him this much support in all the right places – and after a bit he let his eyes drift shut too. Bruce was evidently not a talker when he drove, but then he was never much of a talker. This wasn’t the Bat-mobile, but it did appear to come with any number of technological extras, and Bruce was flicking his fingers rapidly along a screen that only appeared dark at Hal’s angle.

“Whatcha doing?” he said.

“Just communicating with Alfred,” Bruce said. Hal didn’t ask any more questions, and maybe drifted off for a while, as Gotham’s skyline disappeared in the rearview mirror and the car peeled out onto the highway that ran alongside the bay. 

He needed to talk to Carol, and that was another thing that needed to happen sooner rather than later. He had been putting it off. There was a possibility she might hug him, or cry. Or get that look on her face that people got when they knew they should say something, but had no fucking idea what, so they just stood there looking miserable and constipated. That was the nice thing about starting with Bruce – no chance of any uncomfortable emotions there. Or any emotions at all, actually. 

Maybe it was so easy for him to be around that because he hadn’t had any emotions either, for a long time. At first he had had lots of emotions. He hadn’t understood the exhaustion, or the occasional pain – had thought maybe he had the flu, or then maybe that Epstein-Barr something or other, or maybe even some weird alien thing he had picked up. There had been all sorts of tests Leslie had run. When she had all the results, she had had to explain it to him three times before his brain had really taken it in. Such an ordinary thing, really. A ticking time bomb that had been sitting in his DNA all this time. He hadn’t known what to feel, so he had given up on feeling anything. He was just getting through the days now. When he thought about feeling things, he mostly decided he would get around to it eventually. Tomorrow maybe, or the day after. That was the problem with telling people, was they would have feelings, and they would expect him to have feelings too. 

_How are you_ , Bruce had said, and he had had no answer for that. 

The car was crunching over the gravel in the front circle of the Manor when he roused from his reverie. He had been here once or twice – never that often, really. It had always been in the evening, never in the daylight. In the daylight, this place was fucking huge. He got out slowly and took it in, the giant pile of stone and mullioned glass. 

Bruce had opened the front door, and a dog about three times the size of the house hurtled out, headed right for Hal.

“Damian!” he heard Bruce shouting. “Come get your damn dog!” Hal wanted to laugh at it, the aggrieved dad-ness of Bruce’s voice, the ordinary everyday-ness of it. He bent to rub at the behemoth’s ears. The dog had put on the brakes about a quarter inch from Hal, and stood there goofily slobbering and grinning and rubbing its enormous head against Hal’s waist. 

“Titus, come here at once!” said a small imperious voice that was somehow despite its British accent exactly a copy of Bruce’s own, and the dog trotted off to its master, tail happily wagging. 

“Sorry,” Bruce said, ushering him through the front doors and into the vast dim interior. “My son is a bit of an animal lover, but his menagerie is not always under the best control. The upstairs rooms are quieter, but a bit of a hike, so I thought you might prefer a ground floor room for today.”

He was leading Hal down a side corridor that led off from the main entrance hall. Hal had a brief impression of floor-length windows and Oriental vases, thick rugs scattered on slate flooring. The corridor was winding toward the back of the house, and the sunlight was slanting through the windows now. “I thought this one,” Bruce said, pushing back a door into a lushly-appointed bedroom. “Not as spacious as some of the others, but very pleasant light. It’s also got one of the best mattresses in the house, so I thought that might be welcome. The place is yours – make yourself comfortable. The kitchens are down the hall, bathroom is through that door, and here, these open.”

Bruce was fiddling with the window beside the bed, which turned out to be glass doors that opened onto a small grassy courtyard of some sort. The minute he opened the door, a small furry something streaked past his leg. He reached down and grabbed the cat. “Damian!” he shouted again. “For the love of—” He tossed the cat back outside and slammed the door shut. 

“Hope you’re not allergic,” he said. “One might have got past me. Check under the bed.”

“It’s fine,” Hal said, laughing. “Really. This is—”

Bruce was standing there looking at him, like he was. . . concerned about something? Worried Hal might not like it? “Thank you,” Hal said. “This is great. I’m just gonna. . .”

“Of course,” Bruce said. “Towels are in there, if you feel like having a soak. TV controls in the cabinet, and a laptop stowed inside that desk there, if there’s anything you need online. I think Alfred has a simple soup planned for lunch, but if you text me I can let him know if there’s something else you would like. I’ll leave you to it then,” he said, and with that he was out the door. 

Hal sank gratefully onto the bed and only barely restrained the groan. He kicked off his shoes, rolled over in the duvet, and settled into a mattress that felt like it had been carved out of cloud. The room was quiet except for the soft tick-tick of the ceiling fan high above. It was a pretty little bedroom, full of white linens and blue velvet throw pillows on the chairs. The table beside the bed had a lace thingy on it. He wondered if maybe this was the room Bruce’s great-aunts would stay in, when they came to visit. There was an antique-looking vase on the table, next to the lamp, and an old-timey looking picture frame, with some black and white picture in it. A little porcelain dish of some sort – maybe that was where his diamond rings were supposed to go. He was too tired to get up and go look, but there were probably scented soaps in the bathroom, and a bowl of rose petals. 

He had just started to drift off when he was jolted awake by something landing directly on his back. “Shit,” he gasped, and then “Holy Mother of _Christ_ ,” when the little cat dug its claws in. It kneaded his back and settled in, evidently deciding he would do for her nap.

“Come on, you’re kidding me,” he muttered, but he was too tired to dislodge it, and there was room for both of them. Who knew how many more cats were hiding in this enormous house? A cat could probably live here undetected for years, dodging from room to room. For that matter, so could a person. Normal people did not live in a house this big. 

The cat began to purr abstractedly, vibrating his spine, and Hal slipped into a dreamless sleep.

* * *

He woke slowly, gently, like swimming upward. It had been a long time since he had woken that way, probably because it had been a long time since he had slept so deeply. It took a few seconds for him to blink awake, and another few seconds to realize he had awakened because there was a hand resting on his shoulder. 

“Probably time to get up,” Bruce was saying quietly.

“Yeah, okay, I’m up,” Hal croaked. Peeling his body off that mattress was a struggle – his aching joints had conformed to it, somehow, but he swung his legs over and scrubbed at his face. The cat was gone, which was sad. He glanced at the little crystal clock on the bedside table – it said one o’clock. “Shit,” he said.

“I called Leslie, and said you were resting. She pushed back a few appointments, and said you could come at two. So I let you sleep, if that’s all right.”

“Okay, awesome. You were not kidding about that mattress.”

“Indeed I was not. Alfred made a cucumber soup, and has a plate laid for you in the kitchen, if you’d like to grab something before we go.”

“You don’t need to drive me. Honestly, I can just fly there. I do it all the time. What? What is that face for?”

“The Green Lantern has no business zooming around in broad daylight because you can’t be bothered to call an Uber. It’s a security issue, one that has ramifications for the entire League in fact.”

Hal sighed and slid off the bed. “Right, Spooky, because the entire League really gives a shit if I zoom my groceries home from the Safeway. The problem with you is—”

There was no more, because the room spun on its side. One minute his leg was holding him up, and the next minute it was not. It just buckled underneath him, completely without warning, and there was a tremendous crash and splintering crystal everywhere and somehow he was not on the floor, but something was holding him up, had seized him before he hit the floor and was holding him firmly upright. 

“Shit,” he panted. “Oh shit.” And that was the moment when his body decided to feel things again. That moment, of all moments. He had knocked over that beautiful little bedside table, and all the lovely things on it, and the lamp and the clock and the little porcelain dish that had probably cost a small fortune were all lying shattered on the floor, and he had done this – it was his fault. It was that little dish lying broken there – that was what he could feel something about. 

He was aware he was shaking, and aware Bruce’s arms had not let go of their grip on him. He bowed his head to Bruce’s shoulder, but he couldn’t stop the shaking. “I’m so sorry,” he murmured. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

“Shh,” Bruce said. “It doesn’t matter.”

But he couldn’t lift his head. He couldn’t. “I didn’t mean to—it just—”

“Hal. It’s fine.”

But nothing was fine. It was not fine. He was never going to fly again. He was not a pilot, he was not a Lantern, he was nothing, nothing, and nothing was ever going to be fine again, and for the first time his anger and sorrow and rage choked out of him, and he shook under the weight of it. He couldn’t lift his head, because then Bruce would know what was happening. That he was – that his face was wet with it. Those arms held him like a vise. Bruce said nothing. 

He couldn’t have said how long it lasted. Five minutes, or twenty, who knew. It felt like an hour. His throat felt raw from it. There was no word for it, because there was no word beyond shame, and he was so many miles beyond shame right now. There was shame pumping through his bloodstream now, shame scoured into every cell of his body. Good Christ, what had he just done. He got control of himself with difficulty. He was never going to lift his face, never going to look Bruce in the face again. He shifted, tried to ease some weight back onto his leg. 

“Sorry,” he murmured. 

“It’s fine,” Bruce said, like Hal had not just broken his house and then sobbed on top of him. Jesus Christ. Maybe he should piss on the mattress or run over his cat, just for good measure. Hal steadied himself, and his leg held. It hadn’t even hurt, was the thing. It had just given out on him. 

“Tell you what,” Bruce said. “Screw the cucumber soup and broccoli. Let’s get in the car and head to town and swing through a Big Belly drive-thru on the way. We can order burgers and milkshakes and chili fries and as long as we dispose of the evidence before we come back, Alfred will be none the wiser.”

“What happens if he finds out?”

“I throw you under the bus.”

“Fair. Sorry about my nervous breakdown.”

“I have three or four a week. But it’s a big house, no one ever finds out about them.”

Hal gave a weak smile, and Bruce did too. “Come on,” he said, with a squeeze of Hal’s shoulder. “I’ve got to swing by the office anyway, so I might as well drop you at General. Let’s get going.” 

Hal glanced at the wreckage on the floor. It was worse even than he had thought. The lightbulb had shattered too, and there was glass everywhere. The table had snapped off a leg in the fall. “I need – I need to clean this up,” he said. “I don’t want to leave a mess for Alfred to deal with.”

“Believe me, he won’t. There’s a reason Alfred keeps a staff of under-housekeepers. Leave it, and save me the embarrassment of admitting I don’t know where the broom is, much less the dustpan.”

The drive in was strange, because his insides felt strange. Some switch had been flipped, some indefinable something. He had almost forgotten what feelings were like. He didn’t have a lot of feelings, not all of them at once like he had when he had collapsed in the bedroom (or, sobbed like a freaking baby in Bruce’s arms, however you wanted to put that). But somehow the spigot had gotten turned on, and he could feel things more than he could when he got up this morning. He could feel them in every direction too – the burger in his mouth tasted sharper, more like food. Everything he had put in his mouth for the last six months had tasted like ash, so he was surprised when the pre-fab pink-slime bacterially-infested burger of all things tasted good to him. 

He and Bruce chatted on the drive, as they ate their burgers. Bruce ordered a vanilla milkshake. “Really,” Hal said, eyeing his shake. “Well go hog wild there why don’t you.”

“I’m allergic to chocolate,” Bruce dead-panned, and Hal laughed.

“Seriously? What happens if you eat it?”

“Convulsive vomiting.”

“Boy, Halloween must have been a fun time at your house.”

Bruce sucked his straw contemplatively. “You know, I never went. Trick or treating is not that big a deal in England, so Alfred never took me.”

“Yeah, okay,” Hal said. “But. . . weren’t you like eight when your parents died? When you were little, before, they must have taken you.”

“Not really their thing,” Bruce said. 

Hal absorbed that one in silence. “So. . . you probably never took your boys.”

“They were older, when they came to live with me.”

“Wasn’t Dick nine?”

“He was.”

“Nine is not too old for Halloween, trust me on this one. I was dressing up in a grocery sack and shaking down the neighborhood for candy when I was eighteen.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“The worst was when we were young, and Mom would force us into matching costumes. I mean, there were three of us, so you can imagine the excruciating years of being Snap, Crackle, and Pop. Nine or ten was when it was just getting good. I could design my own costume, and didn’t have to be a Rice Krispie. Down side was, I still had to take my little brother around with me.”

“Jim,” Bruce said. 

“Yeah,” Hal said. He studied the skyline of Gotham out the window. 

“You talk to him much these days?” Bruce said, in that way he had of digging right at the exact thing you didn’t want him to.

“Not much,” Hal said. 

“Why’s that?”

“I dunno, how’re things with you and Jason?”

“Touché,” Bruce said, sucking on his milkshake some more. He was quiet until he pulled up in the front circle at Gotham General to drop Hal off. “Listen,” Hal said, undoing his seat belt. “Thank you for everything today. For. . . all of it. And please let me do something about the shit that I broke. I can. . . I can give you some money to replace the things, I’m just really sorry about that.”

“What money?”

“What?”

“I’m just curious, what money will you give me? Because you’ve been on medical leave from Ferris for quite some time now, and unless I miss my guess that’s unpaid leave, and whatever savings you have – probably negligible – you have almost certainly run through by now. So what money are you planning on giving me?”

Hal was silent. He stuffed his Big Belly trash in the sack, and rolled it up. “You know the thing about you, Bruce?”

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

“The thing about you is, I never know who the hell I’m talking to. Am I talking to the Bruce who will let you crash at his house and buy you a burger, or am I talking to the Bruce who says unbelievably shitty things like that? Because fuck if I can figure it out.”

“My only point was—”

“Yeah, I take your fucking point,” he said, getting out of the car and slamming the door behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author's Note:**
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> You don’t have to read this, if knowing personal information about an author spoils the reading of a story for you. _Caveat lector._
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> Anyway, this has been both the hardest story for me to write, and the easiest. The hardest because it feels like nakedness to publish it, and the easiest because I’ve been writing it for a while with no thought of ever publishing it – it was only ever for myself, as a way of working through things by fiction therapy. No one ever wants to read your fiction therapy. (I’m looking at you, Stephenie Meyer.)
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> The thing that I love about comics fandom, and comics in general, is the constant juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary. That is what I can never get enough of. I want to see people with extraordinary gifts and extraordinary abilities facing ordinary problems – how (and whom) to love, how to manage a family, how to face personal tragedy, how to overcome addiction, how to get up out of bed every day when all you want is to never get up. That’s the space I love to inhabit, and I love to inhabit it with these rich and complex characters, whose extraordinary lives are no insulation against all of the above. So I write about illness for all of those reasons, sure. But I also write about it for personal reasons. I’ve written about space cancer and dismemberment and alien viruses and what have you, but this is the first time I’ve written something that is a bit closer to home – well, closer to my home, anyway – than those problems. I’m in these pages, so while the writing of this has been empowering, the publishing of it makes me feel vulnerable in a way that I am unaccustomed to. 
> 
> I'm writing this note because I don’t want someone to think I write about these issues at some fetishistic removal from them. I don’t. It’s just, some days it’s easier to displace my own experience onto fictional characters, and exercise some imagination therapy. And some days that turns into a story, as it does here. Thank you for reading, and for being patient with my imagination.
> 
>  **Emended to add:** No I do not have Marchand's. Nobody does; it's a made-up disorder. There are many many muscular dystrophies, expressing themselves in many different ways, so rather than pick one and send people on some fruitless google, I just made up my own.


	2. Chapter 2

The appointment with Leslie lasted longer than he had thought it would, because she had lined up any number of scans, and there was more bloodwork, and then she made him wait around for the results of the bloodwork while she ran the labs herself. “Because God knows when I’ll get you back in Gotham,” she said sourly. “How have you been since last visit?”

“Good,” he said cheerily. Her eyes above her glasses fixed him with a steady look. 

“Any falls?”

“No,” he said. Her eyes didn’t veer away. “Just one,” he said. “But I didn’t even fall all the way. It probably wasn’t even anything to do with this.”

Leslie’s eyes looked undeceived. “Mm hm,” she said. “Well, starting the physical therapy will help with that. I’d prefer to have you coming here for PT, but that’s probably not practical, so I’ll give you a referral to a couple of people I recommend on your side of the country.”

“I don’t really need PT,” he said. “It’s more just the tired thing. Is there – could you give me something for that, maybe?”

She took off her glasses and cleaned them, carefully. “There are small fixes,” she said. “Being careful about your sleep, careful not to over-extend yourself. But no larger fix. I wish I had a better answer.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

“Last time we talked about conversations you were going to have with people. How has that gone?”

“Ah, it’s a work in progress,” he said. 

“How much progress?”

“Jeez Mom,” he sighed, and she gave a thin smile. 

“I’m thinking a referral to a good therapist would probably be in order too.”

“You mentioned that already.”

“No, not a physical therapist. I meant a psychologist. Someone to talk to. I know things are difficult right now, as you figure out how to rearrange your life, how to accommodate new limitations.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But I’m fine, actually. I’m not depressed or anything like that.”

She was scribbling on her clipboard, frowning thoughtfully as she compared two different scan results. “If you’re not depressed,” she said, “you’re either sociopathic or idiotic. You’ve lost everything that defines your identity, and you stand to lose even more.”

“That’s some bedside manner you’ve got yourself there.”

She gave a small laugh. “So I’ve been told.” 

“Maybe there’s a third thing I could be,” he said. “Other than an idiot or a sociopath, that is.”

“Like deeply in denial?”

“Like a totally self-actualized individual who is at peace with himself and the universe, and really just profoundly okay with things.”

She tore a scrip off her pad and handed it to him. “Fill this,” she said. “And actually take it this time. Come with me, I want to run one of these scans again. Come on,” she said impatiently, as he struggled off the exam table. “Disability is no excuse for dawdling.”

“Really? You’re like eighty years old, how are you so mean?”

“Practice.” 

By the end of it, it was close to six-thirty when he finally emerged from her suite of offices on the upper floor of General. For all her sharp tongue, she had been patient with him, and it hadn’t been that bad, but goddamn it had been a day and a half. A long time since hauling his ass up at oh dark thirty to make it to the east coast. He was shutting the door of her office behind him and slowly heading down the hall when he spotted Bruce.

He was sitting on one of the sofas just outside Leslie’s offices, leafing through an Architectural Digest. Hal walked over and stood in front of him.

“What are you doing here?” Hal said.

“Thought you might feel like something to eat.”

Hal sighed and sat on the Naugahyde sofa with him. He wondered if everything in a hospital was upholstered in shit like this because it was easier to wipe down with bacterial disinfectant. “I probably need to get home,” Hal said. 

“You mean, back to Coast City.”

“Yep.”

“Well, Alfred will be disappointed about that.”

“How so?”

“He was a little irritated about the cucumber soup. I appeased him by saying I might be able to persuade you to come back to the Manor for dinner, and he’s been poaching some salmon. For some reason he thinks very highly of you. I think he may possibly have you confused with the Flash, but I’m not disabusing him.”

Hal tipped his head against the back of the sofa and let his eyes slide shut. Everything in his body ached. “Hal,” Bruce said quietly. “Please come back to the Manor with me. You can barely move, and you’re in no shape to fly. I promise to say as few shitty things as possible. I will even make myself scarce if you want, and you can spend the evening watching PBS with Alfred, or just curled up in bed. But please come back with me.”

Hal rubbed at his eyes. It was true that flying across country tonight was probably not the best idea. And that mattress had been amazing. Spending a whole night on it would be orgasmic. “Alfred’s not mad about the things I broke?”

“I told him one of the cats did it.”

“Wait, really?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I told you, I don’t share people’s business.”

“Yeah, but which cat? Don’t tell him it was the little black and white one, I don’t want her to get in trouble. She napped with me, and I don’t turn on my co-nappers.”

“Your loyalty does you credit. Come on, let’s go have some salmon.”

“Okay,” Hal murmured, his eyes still closed. He didn’t seem to be moving. He wondered how far away Bruce’s car was. “Can I be honest,” he said.

“Please.”

“I’m not sure how up for socializing I am tonight.”

“I know. Let’s just get you back in bed, and Alfred can bring you a tray. I promise to leave you alone.”

“No, I didn’t mean. . . you don’t have to do that.”

“Come on,” Bruce said. “Car’s in valet at the front.” He rose and extended his hand in the exact way he had that morning, in the park. Hal went ahead and took it, because Bruce had already seen the worst, so there was no point in pretending. 

He slept pretty much all the way out to the Manor, and by the time they arrived he was actually a little more rested. His muscles were aching like a motherfucker though. He took some more meds, which rendered dinner a pleasant haze. Alfred had laid places at the vast kitchen table, and joined them as they ate. Damian, he gathered, had been exiled to his room – there had been some incident with the hedgeclippers and the back garden topiaries – so for most of dinner he just sat and listened to Alfred and Bruce chatter back and forth. It was. . . exactly like listening to any adult son having dinner with his elderly father, in fact. It was maybe the weirdest thing he had ever experienced, because it was so fucking normal. That was the hell of it, that was the big joke of it all – that here Bruce was living in this Gothic shit-pile straight out of Beauty and the Beast, with superheroes and tiny ninjas and robotic dinosaurs all running around, but the truth was all that was just a cover, because underneath it was just this really normal boring family where tweenagers got sent to their rooms and dad and grandpa chatted about which lawn service they were going to hire and who had heard from the oldest kid and what had been on C-span today. 

Also, the salmon was fucking delicious. 

“I’m not going to keep a veterinary on retainer,” Alfred was saying, passing around the cauliflower. “But frankly the number of vets willing to come out here and tend to his herd is rapidly dwindling. The last time we attempted to have all the cats corralled in the washroom off the conservatory, but there was a last-minute escape, and a hunt ensued that lasted three hours. For what we were charged I could have bought every purebred cat in the tristate area, and probably a panther or two.”

“Don’t mention panthers to Damian,” Bruce said. “He doesn’t need any encouragement to branch out into exotic animals, and I’m pretty sure that’s the end of us with any landscapers, if we take to having lethal predators roam the property.”

“They’re likely to quit anyway, once they see what he’s done with the boxwood topiaries.”

“Though I suppose hunt isn’t a bad idea,” Bruce said, poking at his salmon. “We could simply tranq gun them, when it’s time for their shots. Set up several ambush points around the house and grounds.”

“Hey there little buddy, bad time to be making an appearance,” Hal whispered, leaning down to scoop up the little black-and-white who was climbing his leg. 

“Aswad, there you are,” said Damian’s voice from the doorway, and both Bruce and Alfred swiveled to glare at him. The cat scampered to Damian’s voice, and the boy picked her up deftly by the scruff. 

“I’m going, I’m going,” he muttered, along with some words that were definitely not English. Bruce’s harsh reply wasn’t English, either, and there was a slammed door somewhere along the corridor. 

“I fear we’ve kept you up far too late, Captain Jordan,” Alfred said, refilling his wine glass for him. 

“No no, I’m good,” he said, suppressing his yawn. “I think I better knock off the wine though.”

“Tim’s coming by in the morning,” Bruce said. “He’s going to help me upgrade some security features in the Cave. I promised him I would deal him in for breakfast.”

“Which you certainly might have mentioned earlier – he prefers blueberries, and I’ve no idea if the ones I bought several days ago are still any good. I shall have to go to the market early tomorrow.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, he can bring his own damn blueberries, you’re not running a short order kitchen here.”

“Master Timothy has placed no orders, which is why I am happy to give him what he prefers. It’s no trouble to go, I shall simply set my alarm a bit earlier than usual. I never have needed much sleep.”

Bruce sighed and rolled his eyes. “Which you will not. I’ll go as soon as we clear the dishes.”

“Oh how kind,” Alfred said. “And some more clotted cream, if they have any.”

Bruce sighed again, and Hal couldn’t help but smile. He tried to help clear dishes, but Alfred clucked and tutted and wouldn’t let him lift a finger, so he headed down the hall to his room, pleasantly buzzed with wine and painkillers. Bruce was rattling his keys and headed out a side door to what probably led to the garage. “You might check and see if we’re in need of lemon curd,” Alfred called down the hall.

“Does that mean we are in need of lemon curd?”

“I believe so, now that you mention it,” Alfred replied, and Bruce muttered something under his breath as he headed out the door. Watching Alfred crack the whip on Bruce, and Bruce jump to it, was definitely worth the whole price of admission to this house. Just the thought of Batman being chased out of his own house at eleven o’clock at night in order to hunt down lemon curd was enough to give him life for months.

* * *

He swam slowly awake to sunlight striping the bed, and a warmth that had somehow seeped into all his bones. He rolled over and burrowed in the unbelievable sheets that were cotton but somehow felt like silk. The door was just barely cracked – someone had been to check on him, and not been careful about closing it. Something landed on the end of the bed, but he was prepared this time.

“Hey little buddy,” he croaked. “Jesus God, what in the fuck,” he managed, because there was something wrong with its mouth – it was covered in red, and it was holding something, and holy mother of fuck, the demon kitten just dropped a dead mole on his feet. The mole was still twitching.

“Are you shitting me? Get the fuck out of here, what the shit is wrong with you?”

The little cat looked so offended, but it was evidently willing to overlook his breach of decorum. She padded up the bed, leaving a trail of small blood-soaked pawprints. “Oh my God, this is The Godfather, I just woke up on the set of the literal Godfather. I am not believing this,” he sighed, hoisting himself out of the crime scene that had once been his comfortable bed. The cat settled in to clean its paws, sparing him an occasional baleful glance.

He must have slept pretty deeply, because someone had been in the room and he hadn’t even woken up for it. Folded on a chair in the corner were fresh clothes – a soft shirt, and freshly pressed cords, and even socks and underwear. He was guessing the clothes were Bruce’s, because he and Bruce were more or less the same size, though Bruce had more muscle on him. The underwear was silk boxers with some kind of expensive-looking pattern on them. It was the same story in the bathroom – a razor had been laid for him, on top of a clean towel, and there was a toothbrush and toothpaste and a bottle of aftershave. He sniffed the aftershave. Definitely expensive. He hadn’t paid attention to the tub last night, and he really should have. It was deep, and it had jets, and there was really no decision to be made here, he was one hundred percent getting in that. 

He spent so much time in that tub he probably fell asleep again, but he didn’t care. His phone buzzed at some point, and he cracked an eye to read Ollie’s _hey what’s up,_ but he didn’t answer. He wondered what Ollie would think if he told him the truth. _Oh you know not much just lying here in Bruce’s gigantic bathtub, what about you?_ Ollie would probably shit himself. Briefly he toyed with taking some selfies of himself covered in bubbles ( _guess where I am??_ ) but the truth was he didn’t really want Ollie to know. It would just lead to questions about why he was in Gotham in the first place, and why wasn’t he staying with Ollie if he was on the east coast, and what was going on, and all the questions he didn’t want to have to answer right now. And also. . . also, if he were being honest, because this place felt like a break from the rest of the universe, and like it was just for him. Like a vacation. Let Ollie get his own vacation.

By the time he hauled himself out of the tub and slipped on the clothes (the silk boxers were a nice touch, no question about it) and headed out the door of his room, he could hear shouts and laughter from down the corridor. But to the right this time, not left where the kitchens were. He ducked his head in to see what looked like a breakfast room, with a table as huge as the one in the kitchen. 

“Not even,” Dick was saying, around a mouthful of muffin. “It wasn’t even that, can you believe it. I made the collar, but all he wanted was directions to a Kwik-E-Mart, for God’s sake.”

“That’s not a real thing,” another tall dark-haired boy was saying. That one must be Tim. “Kwik-E-Mart isn’t real, you idiot, it’s the store where Apu works on The Simpsons. Get off, Steph, you’re drooling on me,” he said, nudging a young woman off his shoulder, where she was dozing. She had long disheveled blond hair and looked like her opinion of mornings lined up with Bruce’s, probably. 

“It is a real thing now, actually,” she rasped, into her coffee. 

“What’s a real thing?” Dick glanced at the doorway. “Hey Hal, what’s up. I tried to save you some food but good luck with this ravaging horde.”

“You’re the ravaging horde,” Damian said from the end of the table. There was a cat Hal hadn’t seen yet, perched on his shoulder. “You’ve eaten at least six of those cranberry oat muffins, I’ve been counting. Those of us who actually live here never have anything to eat once your ravenous maw and enormous arse—”

Dick pitched a muffin at his head, and he caught it without looking. “The Kwik-E-Mart,” the one Tim had called Steph said. “It’s real now. Seriously, I read an article about it. There’s this place in South Carolina that opened a replica of Apu’s store. It’s got the same logo and everything.”

She tucked her legs up on the chair and buried herself back in the coffee mug that was the size of her face. She was wearing an oversized Gotham U. sweatshirt. “There’s a place for you over there, sir,” Alfred said, edging into the room behind him. He was carrying in another tray of muffins in one hand, and a tray of waffles in the other. The waffles were smothered in whipped cream. 

“Oh fuck yes,” Dick sighed.

“How come he gets away with using language like that, and I get grounded if I so much as open my mouth?”

“Because I’m a grown-up, are you kidding me?”

“Kol khara, Grayson, and what’s more—”

“Hey!” said Tim. “You’re not the only one who knows what that means, twerp, so knock it off.”

“That’s enough, all of you,” said Alfred, and they subsided. He was filling their plates with the fresh batch of waffles, but he filled Hal’s first. 

“Also,” Tim said, “not every Facebook link you click is real, Steph, come on. Remember that time you believed the article on how kombucha is laced with CBD oil?”

“Oh yes, please explain to me how computers work Timothy, and I knew that wasn’t real, what are you even talking about?”

“And that’s why you won’t drink kombucha to this day?”

“I don’t drink it because it’s disgusting, do you have any idea what the microbial population of an over-the-counter kombucha even is?”

“Oh yes, please explain to me how biology works Stephanie, I’m not a complete ignoramus about—”

“Could you please keep it down,” Bruce sighed. He was shuffling into the room looking as though he had had maybe an hour and a half of sleep, but Hal was starting to figure out that was just how Bruce looked in the morning. He made a beeline for the coffee on the sideboard and poured himself a mug. 

“What’s up B,” Dick said, getting up to snag himself another muffin from the basket and landing a quick kiss on the side of Bruce’s face. 

Hal almost flinched at the kiss – it was like watching someone absently scratch a tiger behind the ears, but Bruce seemed unconcerned. He was mainly concerned about finding a way around Damian’s horsebeast of a dog, which had parked itself in front of the sideboard in a lazy sprawl. Bruce muttered something that sounded like “damn dog,” but the dog probably interpreted that as a friendly overture, and quickly got up. But the moment he chose to get up was the exact moment when Bruce was stepping over top of him, and the dog’s enormous head shot up and made direct contact with Bruce’s groin, splattering coffee all over the floor. 

“Christ Almighty,” Bruce gasped, clutching at the sideboard and turning a shade of white that Hal did not know human skin could achieve. “Damian, if you don’t get that animal out of here—”

“Titus, kitchens, at once!” Damian ordered, and the enormous thing slunk off, casting one last mournful glance back at his tiny master. 

Bruce took a deep breath and shuffled over to pluck a piece of toast off Tim’s plate. “I see you’ve left me nothing, as usual,” he said. 

“Breakfast did start an hour ago,” Alfred pointed out. 

Bruce grunted and chewed at his toast. Hal’s mouth was melting in bliss from the waffles, and the cream, and the berries, and the sheer abundance of food. There was some kind of syrup that was probably angel jizz and that made him groan aloud with joy. He was either going to heaven, or straight into a diabetic coma. Tim and Steph – and he was trying to work out who she was, exactly, was she a Robin he didn’t know about, or someone else, or just Tim’s girlfriend? – were continuing to bicker, and Damian was continuing to shout across the table at Dick, and Bruce just sat there in stoic silence, eating a bite of toast every now and again. After a minute he got up and refilled his coffee.

“Tim, when you feel like working, I’ll be downstairs. Try to finish before noon, will you? We have a lot of updates to get through.”

“I could help too,” Dick said. “It’s Saturday, I don’t have anywhere I need to be for a while. I told Babs we would go check out the new folk music library across the bay at some point.”

“A folk music library?” Damian said with incredulity. “I shall never understand white people.”

“I’m Roma, baby bird, but thanks for the casual erasure there. Just for that I’m gonna make you come with us. It’ll be good for you.”

“Father, he can’t,” Damian said in horrified appeal.

“Oh, he probably can,” Bruce said, draining his coffee and getting up. “Hal, would you mind coming with me a moment? As soon as you’re done, of course.”

“Oh. Okay, sure. I’ll finish up.”

“No hurry,” Bruce said, and stepped out. Hal leaned closer to Damian, who was sitting at the end of the table next to him.

“Hey listen kid,” Hal said quietly, over the sound of more arguments. “Your cat brought me a little offering this morning, if you know what I mean. The bed looks like the Natural Born Killers had a threesome with Hannibal Lecter, and invited the Manson Family. I thought you might want to know about it so you have a chance to destroy the evidence before Alfred discovers it and you get in even more trouble.”

The kid’s eyes went wide, and he cast a furtive glance first at Alfred and then at the doorway his father had disappeared through. He looked back at Hal, then slipped quickly out of his chair. “I won’t forget this, Green Lantern,” he said solemnly, and Hal nodded back at him just as solemnly. 

Hal polished off his waffles and headed out the door too, wondering where Bruce had gotten to, and how he was ever supposed to find anyone in this house. To the left was the bend in the corridor that led to his room, and to the right was the front of the house, he knew that much. Straight ahead would be the kitchens. So he took a chance and struck right, only he didn’t end up back where he had been yesterday – somehow he had thought it was a straight shot from the entryway? Only clearly it was not. He ended up in a room filled with formal looking furniture and oil paintings, and he walked hurriedly through that one toward what he hoped was the back of the house – an exit was probably his best chance at this point. He turned left, and then right, and ended up in a room with lower ceilings than the bigger rooms, covered in wood paneling. He had the instant feeling he wasn’t supposed to be there. Something in the room’s quiet set off his perimeter alarms. 

He turned to duck out, because the room appeared to have only one doorway, and was struck by a painting on the wall. It wasn’t that large, but it was arresting. A woman, bare-shouldered and with dark hair, her hand draped languidly over a chair, her eyes staring straight out at you. They were not eyes you could look away from, and he knew those eyes. Same jawline, too. Almost too heavy for a female face, but that was just what made the face arresting – taken individually, none of its parts should work, but taken together, it looked amazing. She looked fierce and unknowable and all the things that reminded him of the version of the face he had seen, on a living person. 

“There you are,” said Bruce, and Hal almost jumped

“Yeah,” he said. “Sorry. I was just – looking around.”

Hal looked back at the painting. It was a face you didn’t want to look away from. Bruce came and studied it with him. “You know, I remember when she sat for that,” he said. “It’s the same artist who did the much larger portrait in the conservatory, but this smaller one is the version she liked better. She used to take me with her when she went into the city for her sessions. It was just the two of us, and those were my favorite days. ”

“She was something, huh.”

“Most people would just say she was beautiful.”

“Not really the word for it though, is it.”

Bruce glanced at him. “No it’s not,” he said, and then he turned from the portrait like he didn’t want to be looking at it anymore. “If you’re done with breakfast, come with me for a bit. There’s something I want to show you.”

Hal followed him through another set of rooms that led to the back of the house, and then they were at a set of wide French doors that opened onto the lawn. “Come on,” Bruce said, opening the doors. It was a glorious crisp day, one of the first cool days of early fall, and Hal breathed it in. A bit colder out here than in the city, probably, what with the wind from the bay. He could get a better sense of the house from this terrace than he had had before. It was a U-shape, and they were in the central part. The room he had stayed in must be over to the left. There was a series of stone terraces leading down to gardens, and he could see a flash of blue to the left that told him that was where the pool must be. 

But Bruce was heading to the right, down a series of stone steps. At the lawn he turned right again, following a paved path that led between hedges and quickly hid them from the house. “How did you sleep?” Bruce said.

“Like a dream. Best sleep I’ve had in ages. Thanks for the crashpad.”

“Anytime.”

“So what was it you wanted to show me?”

“When I was young,” Bruce said, “I used to get in all sorts of trouble for playing over at this side of the house. The undergrowth is a bit wilder, and my mother was afraid there might be snakes, which of course heightened its appeal to a young boy.”

“Yeah, I’m not. . . crazy about snakes, either, so if this is you showing me your collection—”

“No no, it’s just this is the path to the carriage house. That was the real draw for me, when I was little. Huge and empty – they built garages for the automobiles when they got them, and left the old carriage house intact. It was a wonderland to me – still full of saddles and all sorts of tack, odds and ends from a hundred years ago. This way,” he said, and then they had come to the back side of the hedges and were at the carriage house, an imposing two-story structure covered in ivy. Bruce was pushing back a door in the side, and Hal followed. 

The ground floor was empty and dark, the only light coming through dim unwashed windows. “Over here,” Bruce said. “It has an elevator to the upper floor. When it became clear Dick was growing up and that was a process that could not be halted or reversed, I started to plan for the future, and what he might like. I had the upper story renovated into a loft apartment of sorts, thinking he might like it.”

He pushed the button for the elevator, which opened soundlessly – a jarring bit of sleek technology in all this quiet antiquity. “He ever live in it?” Hal asked.

“Who, Dick? Never. He wanted his own space, and now that I know more about the way children actually work – well, on my better days – I can understand why. But I did hold out hope that maybe Jason or Tim would want it. So far neither one has shown any interest, so here it sits,” he said, and he opened the elevator door onto one of the most beautiful spaces Hal had ever seen. 

The tall windows that downstairs were covered with dust were clear and light-filled, up here. It was a vast space with almost no walls, but lots of exposed brick, and you could see the old rafters with their iron rivets. The furniture was clean and modern – leather sofas and geometric rugs – and the bed over in the far corner was bathed in sunlight. There was even a widescreen TV, mounted on the one interior wall, the one by the stairwell.

“It has a full kitchen, of course,” Bruce was saying, “and the bathroom is through that door. Didn’t know what to do about all the windows, because it doesn’t leave much wall space, so I had bookcases built underneath them. That way there’s room to put things.”

“Wow,” Hal said. “It’s. . . beautiful.”

“It is nice, isn’t it? But for obvious reasons I can’t exactly put it on craigslist. No one in the family wants it, so it’s a bit useless, which seems like a shame. Oh, and it has its own laundry – it’s downstairs, in the old tack room. Separate entrance and exit through the side gate, too, so no one at the main house ever has to know one’s coming and goings. Plenty of room for a car, down below.” He leaned on one of the low bookcases, arms crossed. 

“Why does it have an elevator?”

“Because it did have one person live in it, about ten years ago. Barbara lived here for a while, after she was shot. It allowed her some distance from her father, which was a good thing at the time. So everything in here is handicapped accessible.”

“Okay,” Hal said. He was still puzzled about what Bruce had wanted to show him. Was it just that he was proud of his interior decorating skills? It was nicely done, the truth was. Clean and light and spare, compared to the heaviness of the Manor. This was probably more Bruce’s taste than the house he actually lived in, though maybe it was a bit too much sunlight to suit Bruce. He wondered what it would be like to live in a house where your grandparents had chosen all the furniture. 

“Nice view,” he said, to be making conversation. You could see across the lawns over to the pool and the poolhouse, from here. He could see why a little boy would have clambered up here, to a secret hide-out.

“It is a nice view,” Bruce said. “And I’m hoping I can interest you in making it yours.”

Hal frowned. “Making it mine?”

“As a place to live.”

“Oh,” Hal said, and then it hit him. “Okay. Ah. . . I see.”

“Please just listen,” Bruce said. “You know you need to be near Gotham, because you need to be near Leslie and Gotham General, at least for the foreseeable future. This would save you flying back and forth all the time. You would have your own space, but when you needed or wanted company, it would be there. And like I said, no one would be keeping tabs on you or anything like that – you could come and go as you like.”

“Yeah,” Hal said. “Um. Bruce, it’s a beautiful place, but I can’t afford anything like this. You weren’t exactly wrong in what you said yesterday, about the medical leave, and—”

“You can’t possibly imagine I am offering to rent this to you,” Bruce said, and for the first time he sounded angry, so Hal was confused. Had he just misunderstood this whole conversation? Was Bruce even more bipolar than he had thought?

“Hal, this is part of my home, and I’m offering it to a friend. This is not a monetary exchange. I have something you could use, something I have absolutely no use for. It just makes sense to me. You don’t have to give me an answer today, but please promise me you will give it some serious thought.”

Hal came and joined him at the window, looking out at the sweep of lawn below. To the left you could see the rooftop of the Manor, and some of the terraces. But he was right, this really was its own enclosed little world. “Okay,” Hal said.

“So you will think about it?”

“No,” Hal said. “I’m saying okay as in, I accept. I don’t need to think about it.”

It occurred to him he had seen Bruce smile like maybe twice in his life. Not just a twitch of the mouth, but a real smile, that spread slowly and softened all his features. “Thank you,” he said, like Hal was the one who had given him the gift. 

“Point of negotiation,” Hal said.

“Hit me.”

“Can I get a deal-in for Alfred’s Saturday breakfasts?”

The smile became broader. “With the right amount of persuasion, I’m fairly sure you can leave a standing order for exactly what berries you want in your muffins.”

“As long as you have to go get them at midnight the night before.”

Bruce laughed aloud. Hal’s chest was thunking with something hard to contain. He was new to feeling things again, so he wasn’t really sure about this one, but it was maybe relief? Happiness? Maybe it was just the first time something good had happened to him in about six months, and he was trying to process it. “Speaking of Alfred,” Hal said. “Is he okay with this?”

Bruce raised his eyebrows. “Well, yes and no,” he said. “Alfred’s preference would be to have you in the house. I persuaded him this was the better option, and one we actually had a chance of you saying yes to.” 

Hal thought of all that boisterous life in the Manor. It had worked on him like a kind of tonic, from the moment Bruce had brought him here yesterday. Like someone massaging at hard knots of loneliness he hadn’t known were there, and now he could breathe all the way down to his toes. “Thank you,” he said, and he had never meant anything more in his life. 

“Thank you for accepting,” Bruce said. 

“So just wondering, when exactly did you get this idea?”

“Yesterday morning in the park.”

“You were planning this the whole time?”

“I was. Behold my endgame.”

“Well played.” He watched as a dark something hurtled down onto the lawns – a horse, maybe, or a small buffalo? No, just Damian’s impossibly large dog, with Damian charging after him. Hal laughed aloud. The thought that he didn’t have to leave all of this, didn’t have to go back and sit in his apartment and stare at the wall anymore, rose up in his chest and filled him with that same sharp knocking feeling as before. He leaned against the window, watching Damian tussle with the horse-monster. He should say something more to Bruce, let him know what this meant, really thank him, but his throat was suddenly tight, and he didn’t know what to say anyway.

“Welcome home,” Bruce said softly.


	3. Chapter 3

“Okay,” Hal said uncertainly. “This is fine. It’s good. See? This is good.” He put a reassuring hand on Damian’s shoulder, to steady him. 

“Nothing about this is fine, Lantern.”

“No, see, you just wander around, see, and you look at the pictures, and you—you find something you like. See? Like that kid over there.”

“Let’s just get back in the car and go home.”

“No.” Hal crouched down to him. “Look, we’re gonna do this, okay? I promised you a Halloween, and by God, we’re gonna have a Halloween. It’ll be fun! Come on, let’s have us some fun.”

Damian looked unconvinced. And okay, dragging the kid to a Party City two days before Halloween had maybe not been the best planning on his part. But all their other costume ideas had fallen through. It had been his fault – he had put too much faith in Damian’s older brothers. 

“A Halloween costume?” Dick had said with enthusiasm. “Say no more, I got you covered. I am all over this.” But then he had shown up at Hal’s place last weekend with a sheet with holes cut in it for eyes. 

“You’re shitting me,” Hal said.

“No, see? It’s a classic! Look, you want him to have the total Halloween experience, right? Well, what American Halloween is complete without the classic ghost costume? And look, we can decorate it, make it more customized. But this, my friend, this is the Ford Mustang of Halloween costumes – the original muscle car of All Hallows’ Eve dress-up. Everyone should get to trick or treat just once in a ghost costume.”

Hal crossed his arms. “You ran out of ideas, didn’t you.”

“All right, yes, sue me,” Dick said, balling the sheet up and tossing it on Hal’s sofa. “You try coming up with something Damian would wear, why don’t you.”

“Simple,” Tim said when Hal asked him. “Easily done. But out of curiosity, what does Bruce say about all this?”

“He, ah, well, you know, he’s out of town for the week.”

Tim’s eyebrows lifted. It was funny how so many of Tim’s mannerisms were perfect echoes of Bruce. “Really,” he said. “A clandestine mission, eh? All right, count me in. I’ll have something for you by day after tomorrow.”

He had put a lot of stock in Tim. From what he had seen, there wasn’t any puzzle that kid couldn’t solve, so he hadn’t really worried any more about the costume idea. Instead, he had moved on to what he considered the fun stuff: pumpkin carving. 

“All right,” he said, when he had the newspapers all spread out on the floor, and the carving implements assembled. That had required a quick commando raid on Alfred’s kitchen, because his own wasn’t stocked with quite this many deadly implements, but he could have them all back before Alfred even knew they were gone. “So what we do is, we cut a hole in the top, and scoop out the guts.”

Damian crossed his arms. “Why,” he said.

“Because – because that’s what you do, that’s why. And if you don’t scoop all the shit out, then you can’t burn a candle inside and make it look all spooky and shit.”

“But surely the point of a jack-o-lantern is to display it so that others can see. Our nearest neighbor here is three miles away, there’s no chance anyone is going to see our pumpkin.”

“Well, we’ll see it, isn’t that good enough?”

“That’s pointless.”

“Okay, what about this. We get this sucker carved, and we put it out by the front gates. That way everyone driving by on the road can see it. Fair enough?”

“Excellent,” Damian said. “But in that case we ought to have two pumpkins, one for each side of the gate.”

“Two pumpkins. Are you shitting me? Look, I only bought one, it’s gonna have to do.”

“Fine,” Damian sighed, and curled up with him on the floor. “What’s the sketchpad for?”

“That’s for drawing your design, right? Because you gotta have some idea what you’re going for, you gotta have a plan. Do you want scary, or goofy, or artistic, that kind of thing.”

“Don’t they all just look the same? With the triangle eyes?”

“What? No! They do not all look the same, trust me. Here, pull that laptop over here and get to researching. Prepare to have your mind blown.”

While Damian researched he started in on the disemboweling, which was way less fun that he remembered it. A lot less fun, actually. How were there pumpkin guts up to his armpits? He stripped off his shirt and dove in deeper, but it was like the motherfucker was a bottomless pit – it just kept getting deeper. It was making his muscles ache like a son of a bitch. Hal finally gave up and leaned back against the sofa, tossing the scooping spoon aside. 

“This one,” Damian said triumphantly, showing him the picture of a mermaid carved in backlit intaglio, her waving hair wrapping the circumference of the pumpkin and merging with the waves of the ocean below. 

“Jesus fuck,” Hal said. “I said look at pumpkins, not the exhibition catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art, what even is this shit?” He snatched the laptop and began scrolling through the images. “I don’t understand, when did pumpkins stop being pumpkins? Why do they all look like something Michelangelo carved on his day off? Who are these people?”

“Well, there’s that one,” Damian said, pointing.

“Oh what, the literal constellation map? By the way that’s not even what those stars look like, take it from someone who knows.”

“No, that one – the cannibal one. That shouldn’t be too hard. We just make a big mouth, and then we stick a smaller pumpkin inside.”

“Yeah, but we don’t have a smaller pumpkin.”

“There are some squash in the pantry. I know because Alfred just got back from the store, and he put them in there.”

“He’s gonna kill us.”

“Not if he thinks Titus did it. He put the squash in a basket on the ground, I could leave the door cracked, make it look believable.”

“You’d frame your own dog for this crime?”

“He already thinks the worst of Titus.”

“Or,” Hal said, “we tell him what we’re doing, and we just ask.”

The room was silent as they thought about that one. “This should only take a minute,” Damian said, getting up and heading to the door for his raid, and Hal said “Yeah, okay, good call.” 

Their pumpkin did end up being fabulous, and they drove it quietly to the front gate, perching it on the top of the stone pillar to the left of the gate. “Getting it up there without damaging it might be a problem,” Damian said.

“Not really,” Hal said, using the ring to loft it gently in place, already lit. It gave off an eerie glow, all the way down Bay Shore Drive. Hal and Damian stood in the dark admiring it. 

“Oh hey,” Hal said. “While I’m thinking about it. Starting tonight you need to need to lock up Farquaad and any other black cats you’ve got indoors, okay?”

“Who is Farquaad, and why on earth would I do that?”

“Because people are shitty superstitious assholes, and they do all kinds of mean things to black cats around Halloween. So just play it safe and keep the black cats indoors. And what do you mean, who is Farquaad? Jesus Christ it’s a good thing I moved in, I know what movie we’re watching tonight.”

“They would hurt black cats? On purpose?” Damian said. “I hate people.”

“Yeah. Well, the bad news is, other planets aren’t any better, trust me on this one.”

“Lantern.”

“Hm.”

“Do you think one day I could. . .” He watched the kid struggle with this one. There was a muscle in his jaw working, and a scowl on his face. “I’d like for you to take me into space. If that’s. . . if you were allowed to.”

He studied the kid. “You want that?”

“Yes.”

“That’s gonna be one of those ask your dad things. I can’t launch you into space without asking him first.”

“You’re taking me trick or treating without asking him.”

“Not exactly the same thing, kiddo.”

Because the pumpkin was such a success, he trusted that the costume would be too. So when Tim showed up the next day with a black bag full of equipment, he sat on his sofa and prepared himself to be amazed. “All right,” he said. “Show me what you’ve got for me.”

“Well keep in mind this is in very rough form,” Tim said, unzipping the black bag. Some colored Styrofoam balls rolled out.

“Uh huh,” Hal said. 

“But the basic idea is, we dress him in black pants and a black shirt. So that’s the base, all right? And then we—well, here you go,” he said, and spilled out the rest of the Styrofoam balls in a heap on the rug. He had also dug out long wooden skewers, like for roasting marshmallows, and begun spearing the balls. “So you probably see where I’m going with this,” Tim said.

“Ah. . .”

“And look, now I’ve got several units assembled, and I can begin connecting them like so, yes? Then they can form a chain that envelops his front. Not exactly sure on how to secure them to his shirt and pants, but I’m thinking pins? Obviously twisting it around for the necessary helical effect would be a challenge. Possibly hot glue is required. But you see what the overall effect would be. What do you think?”

“What the hell is this supposed to be?”

“What do you mean, isn’t it obvious? It’s a double helix!”

“A double helix,” Hal said. “Like. . . the DNA molecule?”

“You think RNA would be easier? Because we could certainly adjust to that, if you think it would be better, I was just worried about recognizability factor. And look, we can color-code the base pairs!”

Hal put his head in his hands. “Bruce,” he said softly, “what have you done.”

“You don’t like it,” Tim said. 

“No no, it’s not that. It’s just – you remember being twelve, don’t you?”

“This was my costume when I was twelve.”

Hal stared at him. Tim was still clutching a couple of skewered base pairs. A lone cytosine rolled across the floor to his foot. “What does Stephanie say about this idea?”

“You mean, what does she literally say?”

“Yes.”

“That I’m a demented neuro-atypical monomaniac who should seek clinical help immediately.”

“Okay, well, I wouldn’t have said demented. I think that was over the top. Thing is, I don’t think your brother is going to go for dressing like a molecular structure, I’ll be honest.”

“Brother is pushing it, but I take your point.”

Hal said nothing to that. It wasn’t news to him, the tension between Tim and Damian. Dick had told him a few of those stories, and it was obvious being around them that not all their competition was friendly. It was a complicated family, but Tim was maybe the most complicated of them all. He seemed in many ways the most self-assured, but it hadn’t taken Hal long to figure out that he was in fact the least sure of himself, when it came to his place in the family. So he didn’t nudge at him about the brother remark, but let it stand. Plus, there was a limit how far you could push someone, after you had shit all over their double helix.

And that was the story of how he found himself in the aisles of Party City two days before Halloween, hoping for inspiration to strike. 

“This is a disaster,” Damian said, and it’s not like the kid was wrong. “I have no desire to be either a sexy nurse, a dinosaur, or a homicidal turtle.”

“It’s ninja turtles, first of all, and look, some of these aren’t so bad, right?” 

“Hey cool check this out!” a kid roughly Damian’s age shrieked, racing past them, and Damian did all but a full body flinch as the other boy neared contact. His face looked like he had been dropped into a cage of wild animals, and was likely to be eaten at any moment. It occurred to him that Damian had never really been around other kids his own age, and had no idea what to make of them – or of normal people, for that matter. 

“Why can’t I just go as Robin?” Damian said with a scowl, regarding the herds around the costume bins with disdain. 

“Because you can’t, all right, that would be cheating. You’re supposed to dress up as something you’re not, that’s supposed to be the fun of it. Going as yourself ruins the whole idea.”

“But you said I would be given candy. Well, the people in this city ought to do something to express their gratitude for everything Robin does. If I go as Robin, it would allow them to give thanks. It would be a fitting tribute.”

“You’re going trick or treating, not collecting blood money from your feudal subjects.”

“All right then, I could go as Batman.”

They both cocked their heads at the pic of the Batman costume – a loose gray and black shell of a thing, with a cheap-looking cape and ridiculous ears. “Points for irony,” Hal said, “but no. That’s still cheating and you know it.”

“We could accessorize with actual grappling wire and smoke flashes.”

“That we stole from the Bat Cave? Yeah no thanks. Come on, there’s bound to be something else here.”

“Here we go,” Damian said with a smirk. He was standing in front of the Green Lantern costume. It actually wasn’t bad – tight fitting black shirt and pants, big Lantern symbol on the front. White gauntlets, a green mask, and a plastic ring. 

“Look at that,” Hal said, “they gave me abs.” The shirt had built-in abs that were actually pretty impressive. 

“The Batman costume has abs too.”

“Yeah, but these are better, come on. And look, it’s probably not a good idea for you to go as any member of the Justice League.”

“Why not?”

“Because—I don’t know, your dad would probably say for security reasons or something like that.”

“I suppose,” Damian said wistfully. He was staring a bit longingly at the Wonder Woman costume. 

“Come on,” Hal said, and the truth was he was eager to get away from this section of the costume store. It wasn’t that he minded. He was fine with it, mostly. And he was still technically a part of the League. He was still technically a Lantern. But it was that “technically” where the knife went in. 

“I think you might have given up too soon on these dinosaurs,” Hal said, squinting at a picture of the T-Rex. It had plastic claws that looked like they meant business. Probably unimpressive to a kid who had a T-Rex in his basement, but still. “Hey what do you think about—”

He turned around, but Damian had gone. “Another bad habit you picked up from your dad,” he muttered. No real mystery where he had gone, and sure enough he found him sitting sulkily in the car. They drove home in silence, and it didn’t help things that it started to rain on the way, turning into a chilly downpour by the time they were greeted at the door by Alfred. Hal silently prayed that another one of the kid’s animals had not been caught in an infraction, and he tried to signal _this is not the day_ to Alfred, but Alfred was as usual impervious to such things. 

“I’ve laid a lunch that I think is particularly to your liking, Master Damian,” he said, as Damian stomped inside.

“I’m not hungry, Pennyworth.”

“There’s a fair in town, over at Wellhampton. I was in search of some fresh gooseberries, and saw the signs for the fair, and – well, the end of the story is that there are some offerings on the kitchen table you might want to take a look at.”

Damian looked suspicious, but he altered course for the kitchens. “No luck, I take it,” Alfred said quietly. 

“How’d you know where we were going?”

Alfred gave him a bemused, slightly pitying look. “Master Harold, surely you don’t think I am unaware of anything that transpires in this house?”

“Fair. And yeah, we came up snake eyes. Who knew one kid could be so picky? I think I’m with Dick, I’m this close to throwing a sheet on him and calling it a day.”

But Damian’s mood improved substantially with lunch, because Alfred had not been kidding about bringing home some food from the fair. It was after Damian had plowed through three corn dogs and was working on his second funnel cake that Alfred made his suggestion.

“You know Master Damian,” he said, pouring himself some tea, “whenever I find myself stumped for answers to a difficult problem, I go for a walk. I find solutions often present themselves that way.”

“It’s raining,” Damian said sullenly.

“Ah so it is. Well, the portrait gallery is always a good place for a walk. Why don’t you try there?”

Damian narrowed his eyes. The effect was a little less menacing than it would have been without the powdered sugar around his mouth. “You want me to take a walk in the portrait gallery,” he said. 

“I do. I think you might find that it clears your head after the morning’s frustration. Go on upstairs while I clean up.”

Hal took advantage of Damian’s absence to finish off the remaining corn dogs, sitting at the kitchen table while Alfred hummed quietly to himself over by the sinks, doing some inscrutable Alfred thing. Alfred had even thought to bring some of those metallic-tasting packets of mustard back from the fair to dip the dogs in. He meditated on the strangeness of his day as he ate, his feet propped on the table, which he would only do because he was out of Alfred’s line of sight. _Master Harold_ , Alfred had called him, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It was the first time Alfred had called him anything like that. He considered his corn dog, the perfect sogginess of its interior next to the optimal crispness of its outer shell. He wondered if Bruce would ever eat anything like this. But then, he now knew the answer to that one: Bruce never ate much of anything.

Even that first day when they had gone through the Big Belly drive-thru, Bruce had only picked at his burger, and had a few sips of the milkshake. It was the same with every meal he had ever seen Bruce eat – he would poke at his food, or else he would eat a piece of toast and then lose interest. He would wonder what Bruce did manage to eat if he hadn’t seen the rows of kale shakes stacked in the refrigerator. Alfred was always blending something up for him and setting it aside. He would have to ask Bruce at some point what he had against solid food. 

He balled up his trash and came to help Alfred dry and stack dishes, and then he took the shortcut through the south wing to the carriage house, because it was still pouring rain. He kicked off his sodden shoes and crawled up on his bed, his eyes slipping shut almost immediately. It had been a long morning, and it had tired him more than he had hoped it would. 

_Your muscle strength is stabilizing well,_ Leslie had said at his last appointment. 

_That’s like when you congratulate the kid with a C-plus for not failing any worse_ , he had answered. 

_How is the exhaustion?_

_Flourishing, thanks for asking._

The first week he had moved in, Bruce had hired movers to come switch the mattress in the carriage house with the one from the guest room bed he had slept on in the Manor. “Bruce, come on,” he had said. “You don’t have to do that.” 

“I know,” he had replied. “But it’s not altruism on my part. There are blood stains on this mattress, I can’t leave it in a guest room. It’s yours now.” 

“How is Damian’s demonic cannibal cat my fault?” 

“You probably encouraged it in some way.” 

“Whatever. At least living in the carriage house, I won’t have to deal with your son’s Emotional Support Menagerie." 

But that was exactly where he was wrong, of course. Because it was maybe the fourth morning after he had moved in that he had been awakened by a soft nuzzling of his neck that in his dream became the time he and Carol had taken that beach vacation to Mexico and rented one of those private cabanas and fucked until their eyeballs bled, right there on the beach. “Mm baby,” Hal had murmured, and opened his eyes to the soft unblinking gaze of Damian’s fucking Great Dane, his head right on a level with Hal’s. He leaned down and gave Hal’s ear another lick. 

“Damian!!!” he had shouted, pointlessly of course. As it turned out Titus was expert at opening doors, and would come and go as he pleased, anywhere on the property. One of his favorite places was Hal’s apartment, where he would sprawl in the middle of the room, taking up about seventy percent of available floor space. Not that Titus was that different from the rest of the family, really. Hal had been very careful about boundaries after he had moved in, and never made free with the Manor at all – he came to the house when he was specifically invited to, and not otherwise. But the boys, it must be said – Damian especially – tended to treat Hal’s house as though it were an extension of their own. Tim lived on campus at Gotham U., and Dick of course had his own place in Bludhaven, but somehow whenever they were over at the Manor they found their way to Hal’s game system and his steady beer supply. Hal didn’t mind, and was pleased, when he got over his initial surprise at it. It was just that he had lived alone for his entire adult life, and other people regularly in his space was a new thing for him, though Titus’s regular make-out sessions took being in someone’s space to a whole new level. 

Which was why he thought at first that it was the horse-beast of a dog that had jumped onto his bed with a thunderous leap, instead of the horse-beast’s owner. “Lantern! Wake up!” Damian said. “I have news. 

Hal lifted a weary head. “I know for a fact we have had the conversation about waking me up." 

“But this is important.” 

He sighed and rolled over. “Okay, hit me.” 

Damian thrust a piece of paper at him. Hal struggled to focus. It was a drawing of some kind. “You drew me a picture of a pirate,” he said. 

Damian shook the paper at him, and he took it from him. Actually, it was a really good drawing. An amazingly good drawing. It was a man with flowing hair, an eyepatch, and a black sling on one arm. “Did you do this just now?” he said. 

“Yes of course. You’re missing the point, Lantern. This is not just any pirate, this is the famous eighteenth-century privateer Alastair Stillwell. He worked for the Continental Congress in the Revolutionary War in this country, and was the most feared pirate of the eastern seaboard. He once seized and plundered a British frigate that outgunned him by thirty cannon. Pennyworth told me all about it.” 

“You don’t say,” Hal said, propping on his elbow. 

“And there’s more. Do you know what else he is?” 

“Dead?” 

“He’s my great-great-great-great grandfather, that’s what else.” Damian sat back and crossed his arms. 

“Really,” Hal said, looking at the sketch again. Actually, there was something in that jawline that looked familiar. 

“That’s what I’m going to be,” Damian proudly announced. 

“Uh. . . kiddo, pretty sure your dad is not down for you becoming a pirate." 

“No, not in actual life,” he said, as though Hal were stupid. “For Halloween. That’s what I’m going to be. Captain Stillwell, privateer and war hero.” 

Hal studied the drawing again. “You know this drawing is really, really good, right? Like, actually good?” 

Damian snatched it back. “Stop getting bogged down in irrelevancies, Lantern, and try to pay attention. Get up, we have work to do.” 

“Of course we do,” Hal sighed, and swung his legs over the bed. This family was going to be the death of him. 


	4. Chapter 4

“Okay,” Hal said. “Just like we planned it. You walk up to the door, you wait for them to open it, you say Trick or Treat, and they give you the loot.”

“You realize, Lantern, I’m not an idiot. Three-year-olds can master this, I’m fairly sure I have it managed. Except,” he said.

“No no no, there is no ‘except,’ what do you mean ‘except’? It’s just like I said.”

“There are no conceivable circumstances under which Captain Stillwell would have said ‘trick or treat’ to anyone. It’s just wildly out of character, anyone can see that.”

“What are you—this isn’t method acting, it’s Halloween, okay, this is just what people say. Trust me on this.”

“There isn’t something else I could say? Something with a bit more flair?”

Hal gave him a once-over. The kid was wearing an ankle-length black satin cape, a white linen French-cuffed ruffle shirt with lapis studs, and a velvet buccaneer’s hat, topped off by the eyepatch and black velvet sling. The leather knee-boots hugged his calves like a second skin, and the sword at his waist was, in fact, Captain Stillwell’s original gold-handled, pearl-inlaid sword, kept in a locked case in the library, which Alfred had lovingly bestowed.

“More flair, what the fuck are you talking about. You look like the unholy love-child of Paris Fashion Week and Gotham Pride. If you had any more flair you would spontaneously combust. Now come on, let’s do this thing.”

“All right,” Damian said, getting out of the car and looking suspiciously around him. “But I still say, I’m very unlikely to get any good candy in this neighborhood. Everyone here is far too poor.”

“Too poor? What the hell are you – go on, get going, poor my ass.” He had driven the kid to one of the nicer suburbs near Wellhampton, but because the staid colonials and manicured lawns didn’t come with five-mile long stone gates, Damian clearly thought he was in some kind of a slum. _Nice fucking work, Bruce_ , he thought. _Your kid has a real firm grasp of actual life here._

“Go on, you got this,” Hal said encouragingly, leaning on the car. He nodded at the first house. There were herds of other kids moving around in the dark, laughing and calling to each other and waving flashlights, and Damian had that same deer-in-the-headlights look he had had in Party City, when he had spotted other kids his age. “Go kill it, Captain,” he said, and Damian trooped up the brick walkway to a pleasant-looking house with jack-o-lanterns on the porch. 

All Damian’s initial hesitation vanished, of course, once he had had his first experience of free candy. “Look at what they gave me,” Damian said, running back to the car awestruck, holding out fistfuls of his haul. “There are whole candy bars in there!”

Hal clapped a hand on his shoulder. “You’ve been blooded,” he said. “Today you are a man. Now get out there and kick ass. Meet back here in forty-five minutes, and dibs on the atomic fireballs.”

Damian ran off with bloodlust in his eyes, and belatedly it occurred to Hal they really ought to have had a talk about how that sword needed to stay in its scabbard at all times, but. . . it would probably be fine. Almost definitely. It wasn’t like he had sent a kid with anger management issues off to compete with other children for limited resources while armed with an actual deadly weapon, or anything. 

He tracked Damian as he moved down the street, cape snapping in the breeze behind him. He grinned. Alfred had really come through for them. Every bit of that costume had been hand-tailored by Alfred, who had probably stayed up all last night to get it finished. When he had held it out for Damian to see this morning, there had been literal stars in the kid’s eyes. “The very image of Captain Stillwell,” Alfred had said, standing behind him in the mirror, and Damian had lit up like a Christmas tree. And of course the whole thing had been Alfred’s idea in the first place, sending him off to the portrait gallery like that. 

“Hey,” Hal had said quietly, as Damian had raced off to admire himself in the long mirrors in the conservatory. “How did you know he would go for the Pirate Sith-lord thing?”

Alfred gave a thin smile. “The truth is, Master Harold, I had bits and pieces of this costume lying around. I once knew another young boy whose favorite play was to dress up like Captain Stillwell and cut a dashing figure as he romped through the house, slicing the parlor curtains to ribbons.”

“You don’t say,” Hal said, trying to picture that one. “Hey, I guess that whole black cape thing really stuck with him, huh?”

Alfred chuckled. “Well, I’ll not be the one to point that out,” he said.

Hal eased onto the hood of his car to wait it out. He figured Damian was too old for him to hover on the sidewalk and follow him around, like the moms of some of the other kids were doing. Briefly he considered wandering over and striking up a conversation with some of those moms – quite a few of them were looking pretty good in their leggings and boots, and he was betting at least some of them were single, but he quietly shelved the impulse. They were looking to have a good time with their friends and their kids tonight, not for some creeper to come talk them up, and anyway. . . he didn’t want to think about anyway. 

“So the reports are true,” said an easy voice at his ear, and a tall young man in a leather jacket slid onto the hood beside him. Hal frowned at him, and the young man broke into a grin.

“You don’t recognize me, do you?”

It was the grin, of course, that gave it away. “Jason,” Hal said. “It’s. . . been a couple of years.”

“Look at you, master of the euphemism. So listen, when I first heard about this whole Halloween boondoggle, I thought surely not, this can’t be true. But unless my lying eyes deceive me, that is exactly what’s going on here.”

“Yeah, Fonzie, it’s called Halloween. An event no one in your family seems to have heard of.”

Jason laughed again. “Well you’re not wrong there. But every damn day is Halloween for that pack of weirdos, what do you expect? Excellent choice on the costume, by the way. Beats hell out of being a double helix, I will say.”

“Yeah, Alfred really came through.”

“I dunno, from where I’m sitting, looks like someone else did too.”

“How’d you know about Tim’s costume idea anyway? For someone who doesn’t live at the Manor, you sure do hear an awful lot about what goes on there.”

“And don’t you forget it,” he said, turning to watch a couple of women amble past him. One with long blonde hair shot him a sidelong gaze, and he grinned at her.

“Stop macking on the moms,” Hal muttered.

“Oh like you weren’t thinking about doing it. But yeah, I hear things. Here’s a little 411 for you, since you’ve taken to living in the Bathouse. Not everything Bruce thinks is true, is true. Like he’s got this whole thing in his head where I just don’t exist anymore, and he thinks because I don’t talk to him, I don’t talk to anyone, and no one talks to me. So my piece of advice is this: don’t ever mistake Bruce for the family, because those are two entirely different things, much as he might wish that weren’t the case.”

Hal was silent. He wasn’t going to be baited into bad-mouthing Bruce. “You ought to give your dad a call sometime,” he said. 

Jason just fixed him with a long steady look. “There’s a lot you’ve got to learn,” he said, but there was no anger behind it. Only a kind of sadness. They sat there in silence on the hood of the car for a while, watching the herds of kids move down the sidewalks. 

“You want me to drop back, do a little surveillance on him?” Jason said quietly, and Hal shook his head. 

“Ten bucks says he’d spot you. Leave him alone, he’s got this.”

“Okay then.” Jason slid off the hood and stood regarding him. “So if I’m the Fonz, what are you dressed as?”

“Unemployed drifter working on his dad bod.”

“I don’t know about that, your bod looks all right from where I’m standing.”

Hal was busy scanning the street for signs of Damian, and missed it at first. Took a couple of seconds for that to hit bottom, and when he looked at Jason, Jason was just standing there with his arms crossed, and he was running his eyes over Hal in a look both appraising and unmistakable. 

“Kid, did you just come on to me?”

“A little, how’m I doing?”

“Terrible.”

Jason gave a low easy laugh, the dangerous twin of his laugh from before. “Oh I don’t think so,” he said. “Seriously though, you watch yourself. It ain’t no walk in the park, living in that house. Take it from someone who knows. You ever want to talk to someone, you know where to find me.”

And with that he ambled down the sidewalk, taking his time and nodding at the clusters of women standing around. “I don’t actually know where to find you,” Hal said, pointlessly, because Jason was out of earshot. He got off the car and moved in the opposite direction, looking around for the buccaneer hat and its bobbing ostrich plume. 

He wondered who it was that Jason regularly talked to. Dick was the most likely possibility. Alfred, maybe? And Tim. . . that was a hard one to figure. The whole family was hard to figure. The ones you thought were the most open ended up being the most inscrutable, and vice versa. Except for the animals, they were easy. But Damian, for instance. He had thought he had figured out everything there was to know about that kid in the first five minutes, but the things that came out of his mouth sometimes. He would say the weirdest goddamn things. 

“Hey Damian, what are you—” He sighed, as the kid shot across the street in front of him. “For fuck’s sake wait up will you? I can’t move that—”

He saw it before he knew he was seeing it, that quick yellow flash. An unearthly radiance. A shadowy form. Tentacles, but the tentacles resolved into a human form, a face. A face he knew. But it couldn’t be. He froze. The herds had moved on, and the street was momentarily deserted. And there, beyond that row of hedges – had he imagined it? Hallucinated it? But for one blinding instant, it had been there, as clear as day, as bright and forbidding as sunlight. He knew what he had seen, but his brain broke on the impossibility of it. 

“Where are you?” he said hoarsely into the dark. “Come out here and show yourself, you motherfucking—”

And then a group of kids crashed through the hedges, and it was their flashlights waving around, it had only ever been the kids. But he stood there at the hedge a long time, waiting. Listening.

* * *

“And then I saw a group of young thugs, most of them probably seventeen or eighteen, and they were just lying in wait around the corner, waiting for the younger ones to come their way. Not the really young ones, because they all had parents, but the ones old enough to go on their own, but too young to defend themselves against that kind of scum. And they were robbing them of their candy, Lantern, holding them and just shaking out their buckets and taking whatever they liked, can you imagine that kind of evil? So of course I put a stop to it at once.”

“Damian, if there’s blood on that sword, Alfred’s gonna have both our hides.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” The kid was happily chattering away as Hal drove, stuffing a Three Musketeers in his mouth as he talked ninety miles an hour. “Of course I know better than to leave a mark. I dispatched them easily, but that’s why I don’t have as much candy as I might have – I gave them some of mine to make up for what they had already taken, and then I had to spend the rest of the night guarding the corners to make sure they didn’t come back. All in all, a satisfactory outcome I must say, and I do think at least one of them is going to need medical attention. Which reminds me of what I wanted to ask you. Are you dying?”

It was to his credit he didn’t swerve off the road into a ditch. “Who—why would you think that?”

“Because Father said you were sick, but that I wasn’t to ask you questions. I assume that meant you were dying.”

Hal gripped the steering wheel harder. “It’s not like that,” he said. “There are just things I can’t do as easily as I did before.”

“Are you getting better then?”

“No,” he said.

“Oh,” Damian said. “Well, that’s too bad then. About the not dying, I mean.”

“You were hoping I was dying?”

“If you were dying, I could probably fix you.” He was rummaging around in his bag and emerged with a box of milk duds. He poured some out and began to chew meditatively. 

“Fix me,” Hal said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You swear quite a bit around me,” Damian said. “It’s not that I mind. It just means you haven’t really been around children much in your life, which is fine of course. I like it, in fact.”

“Oh do you. What do you mean, you could fix me if I were dying? Is this some Tibetan bullshit like your dad’s?”

“No.” Damian fell silent for a bit, examining the box of milk duds. “And it doesn’t have anything to do with Father. He doesn’t. . . there are things about me he doesn’t know.”

“Like what?”

“You know that I’ve been dead.”

“Yeah,” he said quietly. 

“Well, when I got back, things were. . . different for me, for a while. I had powers, I don’t know if you knew about that. But then they went away. Father thinks they all went away, but they didn’t.”

Hal had pulled into the front of the Manor, and they sat there in the gravel circle. “I can do things,” Damian said. “I can help people more than he realizes. I haven’t told him, because. . . because I don’t think he’d understand. Anything to do with magic, especially if it has to do with my mother or my grandfather, he doesn’t like at all. And also because it would make him worry. So don’t tell him, all right?”

“I don’t share people’s business,” he said. 

“You probably think I’m just mentally deranged.”

Hal sighed. “I dunno, kid,” he said. “I have seen some shit in my day, you know? So I’m the last one to say something makes you sound crazy. But I also think that you should really think about talking to your dad. He might know more than you think he does, about supernatural shit.”

“If Mother were alive, she would understand,” Damian said. “She would be able to explain it to him.”

“Yeah,” Hal said. “Ah. . . didn’t she, you know, try to kill you?”

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand, Lantern. There are things in my family that people who lead ordinary lives will never be able to comprehend.”

“Ordinary lives, huh. Son, I’m a fucking Green Lantern.”

“Are you still a Lantern?”

Hal sat in silence, staring at his hands in his lap. I’m not sure was probably not the best answer to give. “It’s not just something you can walk away from,” he said. Damian seemed to accept the evasion, though he had inherited all of Bruce’s terrifying directness, that was for sure. 

“I meant to say, I’m glad you’re not dying,” Damian said. 

“Yeah, me too,” Hal said, tasting the lie in the back of his throat. “Come on, let’s get in the house. You might think Halloween’s over, but let me tell you, the fun part is just beginning. Now is when it really gets good, because now is when the sorting and trading of the loot begins.” He reached over and ruffled Damian’s hair, and for once the kid didn’t flinch out of the way or dodge physical contact with a contemptuous snort.

So they spread out all his candy on the vast kitchen table, and even though Damian was all for diving in and finishing off most of it this very instant, Hal insisted that he play by the rules. “No no no,” he said. “That’s not the way this goes. See, you have to sort like with like, and then you have to rank them by what you like and what you don’t like.”

“I’m not sure what I like,” he said. “Pennyworth never has allowed me to eat any of these things. I don’t even know what most of them are.”

“All the better then, we gotta taste test. And see, here is where we come to the delicate negotiations part of the evening, because there is such a thing as a driver tax. I drove you there, so I get a share of the loot, those are the rules. I claim the Reese’s Cups.”

“What? That’s ridiculous, that’s absolute robbery. I’m the one who went door to door for this candy, while you sat on your arse. Why should I have to share any of it?”

“You don’t even know what Reese’s Cups taste like, why do you care?”

“I know they must taste good, if you want them!”

Hal snatched up three Reese’s in his hand. Damian narrowed his eyes. “Put those down,” he hissed.

“Make me,” Hal said. Damian unsheathed his sword. Hal raised his ring, and constructed a sword of his own. Damian scowled.

“That’s a light saber, you cheater.”

“Hey, it’s not my fault mine makes a cool whoosh noise and yours doesn’t. En garde, you selfish Reese’s-hoarding little monster.” Damian swung and struck, and Hal laughed aloud and parried at the last possible second, and countered with a sweeping blow that Damian parried just as deftly, and they were off – dueling around the table, leaping on top of the table, swinging for a quick precarious moment from the chandelier, hitting the ground only to roll over and come out swinging and shouting with laughter as the kitchen rang with the sound of steel on humming light. Damian was edging him into the far corner, but Hal leaped at the last moment onto the back of the overstuffed chair by the fireplace, and had just raised his sword hand for the finishing blow when—

“What,” said the voice from the doorway, “is going on here?”

It was Bruce, and he didn’t sound amused. For a quick second Hal saw the room as he was seeing it – his kid up till midnight, a potentially deadly sword fight that had destroyed his kitchen, candy strewn all over the table and spilling onto the floor. Damian hurriedly sheathed his sword and tried to right his costume. 

“It’s—it’s Halloween, Father,” he said. 

“It was my idea,” Hal said, stepping forward. “It was me. I thought it would be fun.”

“Fun,” Bruce said, like he was reading the word in a dictionary, and the dictionary was in a foreign language. Hal rested a hand on Damian’s shoulder, and for the first time he realized that for all Damian’s worship of his father, he also feared him. Bruce’s eyes were taking in the mess on the table, the destruction of the kitchen. 

“You went trick or treating,” he said. 

“Yeah, I took him a couple of towns over.” He kept his hand on Damian’s shoulder, and he saw Bruce’s eyes flick to that hand. 

“And I’ll wager you were under strict instructions, Damian, to take good care of that sword, which I happen to recognize. I’m sure you were told never to take it out of its scabbard and never to wave it at someone, much less to charge around this house like that. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, sir,” Damian said. 

“Bruce, come on, he—”

Bruce’s eyes on him were sharp, and then they were back on Damian. “What do you think Alfred would say, Damian, if he knew how you had behaved tonight?”

Damian said nothing. “I expect an answer,” Bruce said, more sharply.

“Look, I told you, the whole thing was my idea, okay, Damian didn’t—”

“He would be disappointed. Sir.”

Bruce nodded, walking slowly around the table, inspecting the piles of candy on it. He picked up a white chocolate Kit Kat and considered it. “Well if that’s the case,” he said, “I suppose it would be worth your while to make sure he doesn’t find out, wouldn’t it?”

“It. . . would, yes sir.”

Bruce held up the Kit Kat. “Every white chocolate Kit Kat in this horde, and he never hears it from me.”

Damian crossed his arms. “A privateer never relinquishes his plunder.”

“A good privateer knows when he’s been outgunned.”

“A better privateer knows when he’s being bluffed.”

Something passed between them that Hal couldn’t decipher – a strange quirk of Bruce’s mouth, an arch of Damian’s brow. And then Damian launched himself across the table at his father with a war cry that could surely be heard from the front gates, and probably from Gotham Harbor. 

But Bruce was ready for him, and seized his middle, twisting him and hurling him toward his back, and Damian was pummeling at him while Bruce laughed, and Damian was laughing too, and whatever completely fucking bizarro ritual Hal was witnessing he had no idea, but it was clear that this was their thing. Bruce had hoisted him and was carrying him to the overstuffed sofa by the wide stone fireplace, flipping him onto his back, but Damian was far too skilled for that, and ricocheted off the sofa to launch himself at Bruce’s back again, like a small determined velociraptor bringing down the T-Rex. They fought and wrestled and laughed and landed blows that would definitely have broken bones on normal humans, and Hal just stood there watching, a little unable to believe what he was seeing. 

When they had exhausted each other, Bruce packed Damian off to bed, confiscating his sword first. The grin on Damian’s face was transformative – it was like the kid was lit from within, radiant with milk duds and happiness. Hal eased into a chair at the table, and Bruce loosened his tie and pulled two beers out of the fridge, setting one down in front of Hal. 

“I think you’ve probably earned that,” Bruce said.

“Oh you have no fucking idea. Didn't think you guys had any beer around this place though.”

“Dick is in the habit of leaving some, when he visits. And I have a pretty good idea of what your night must have been like. Cheers.”

Hal clinked his bottle against Bruce’s, and let the cold tang of the beer wash down his throat. “Thought you were in Indonesia,” he said. 

“Had to come back early.”

“That because of a Wayne Corp thing, or a Batman thing?”

“A bit of both,” he said. “Thank you for what you did for my son tonight.”

“We both had a good time.”

“I’m afraid he wore you out. How are you?”

“Tired,” Hal admitted. He hadn’t wanted Damian to see just how tired, but it probably showed in his face. And the pain had started to set in. He had swallowed some meds surreptitiously, a bit ago, but they wouldn’t do much tonight. He pulled another chair closer and propped his leg on it, just to ease the pull on that quad. 

“Alfred has given me a little training in physical therapy,” Bruce said, “especially therapeutic massage. I don’t have his gift, but I’m not bad. May I?”

“Sure,” Hal said, because he was never going to turn down a free massage. Bruce rose and knelt beside his chair, and dug gentle fingers into Hal’s quad, careful to ease off when he felt Hal’s muscle spasming beneath his grip. He found a slow steady rhythm. Hal bit back a groan with difficulty. Jesus Christ, Bruce’s fingers. They were like heated iron. 

“That helping?”

Hal nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He had another swig of his beer. “Sometimes the muscles,” he said, “they lock, and they don’t—unlock, or unlock in the right way.”

“I know,” Bruce said. “You shouldn’t let him exhaust you like this. He worships you, of course, but that just means he doesn’t know when to let you alone.”

He wondered if he ought to tell Bruce he had seen Jason tonight. “Yeah, well, I don’t think worship is the right word.”

“Then you don’t know him well enough yet.”

“He talked about his mom for the first time. I’ve never even heard him mention her.”

Hal felt the hesitation in Bruce’s fingers at that, but he kept his head bowed to Hal’s leg, and kept working at it. “He doesn’t, very often,” Bruce said. “But his feelings for and about her are powerful. She was a complicated woman.”

“Someone trying to kill you doesn’t seem that complicated to me.”

Bruce stopped massaging, and studied Hal’s leg instead. Then he rose and sat in the chair next to Hal, studying him just as intently. “Tonight,” Bruce said. “When you thought I was genuinely angry with Damian. You put yourself in between him and me. As though you thought my anger might make me hurt my own son. It was a protective instinct that does you credit, but it occurs to me it’s an instinct only shared by certain people.”

“And what kinds of people are those?”

“People who know what can happen to a child with a complicated parent.”

Hal was silent at that, and drank some more beer. If that was an invitation to talk about Martin Jordan, he was not going to take it. “My only point is, those are the people who know how love and hatred can live side by side in the same person. Damian knows and understands his mother’s homicidal tendencies. But he also knows the other side of her was just as real.”

“Sounds like you know it too.”

“Well. She and I had a history that was—”

“Complicated, yeah, I get it. Now me, if someone has ‘homicidal tendencies’ on their Tinder profile, I’m probably gonna swipe left. But from what I know of your dating life, that is a little less true for you.”

Bruce gave a grim snort that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Talia and I never dated,” he said. “There were things she wanted to be true that were not, and were never going to be.”

“Well sure, but you dated long enough to have a kid together. Not sure what your parameters of dating are, but that seems to fall within them.”

“If Talia wanted something, she took it. She raised Damian to be the same way, and I’ve had a struggle undoing what she did to him, in that regard. Talia decided that she wanted me, and when I proved. . . unwilling, well, she took that too.” Bruce took a deep swig off his beer. Hal just watched him. 

“Jesus,” Hal said. “Does Damian know that?”

“No. And he never will.”

“Yeah but—I’m thinking, that might help him engage with reality a little bit more, about his mom.”

“To what end? He can survive knowing about his mother’s murders, and even knowing his mother tried to kill him. Knowing that what happened between his parents was not consensual. . . I’m not sure he could survive that one. Anyway, I have no intention of finding out.”

“There’s a shorter word than ‘not consensual.’”

“I know the word.” Bruce rose and gathered their empty bottles, taking them into the kitchen and putting them in the sink. He came back from the fridge with two more beers, and set one in front of Hal. “You understand I’m telling you things Damian must never know. Even Alfred doesn’t know that one.”

Hal nodded. They settled into their second beers in silence, but it was a silence full of thought. “So you’re right,” Hal said after a bit. “I don’t talk to Jim.”

“Your younger brother.”

“Yeah. But that’s because of him, not because of me. He. . . about a year ago. He cut me out of his life. So my two nephews, the only family I’ve got – I haven’t talked to the boys in a year.”

“Why’d he do it?”

Hal drank some more beer and stared out at the lawns through the wide window. It was dark, but there were lights on the lawn below, and he could see the outline of the stone terraces. The trees whipping in the wind, as the weather was getting colder and harsher out there. But the kitchen was warm, and Alfred’s fire was still crackling in the vast fireplace. Hal studied the label on his beer. Some fancy Scandinavian shit, in a language he didn’t know.

“Jim and I were close, growing up. I looked out for him, you know? And he – we were close, like I said. We talked about things. Our house was. . . it was not always an easy place to be a kid. After dad died, when Mom started drinking – well, started is probably wrong – and even before he died. Especially then. But anyway, yeah, we were close. Even now, we’ve stayed close. He knows I’m the Green Lantern, for one thing.”

He saw Bruce set his beer down at that one. “Yeah, you want to yell at me about that, don’t you, but then I wouldn’t tell you the rest of the story, and now you really want to know.”

“I’m in a bind here,” Bruce said, and Hal gave a short laugh.

“Anyway, a while ago Jim and Susan got religion. Like, big time. Growing up, we weren’t really much of anything. I mean, technically Jewish, but all that meant was a light-up menorah next to the Christmas tree. I honestly never thought about it at all. But for whatever reason, Jim and Susan have gotten really into it. Like, they pulled the boys out of public school and put them in a Jewish day school, and they go to some Orthodox synagogue – like, they are really into this shit. They got Jesus, or whatever the Jewish equivalent of that is.”

“You really don’t know much about your religion, do you?”

“Hell no.”

“So what does his getting religion have to do with not talking to you anymore? Does he have religious objections to your being a Lantern?”

Hal rubbed at the beer label and the fancy lettering. Who the hell knew what it was. Finnish, probably. “At some point in high school,” he said, “I guess I was a senior and Jim would have been a sophomore. And he catches me making out with someone behind the concession stand at a football game. I laughed it off, explained to him, and I thought we were cool. I really didn’t think it was something he would even remember all these years later, for fuck’s sake.”

“Who were you making out with?”

“The captain of the football team.”

This time Bruce was the one to laugh aloud. Hal smiled too. “Yeah, it is pretty funny,” he said. “In retrospect. So a while ago Jim calls me up and says, we need to talk. This was when I was planning on coming for Thanksgiving. And he says, I need to know if you still do the sort of thing you used to do in high school. And I’m thinking, the fuck is he talking about? Do I still do a shit ton of weed? Cut geometry class? What the fuck? Turns out, that wasn’t what he was talking about. He said. . . he said, I have my boys to think about. So I need to know.”

He heard Bruce’s long slow exhale at that. “Yeah,” Hal said. “Like I’m a fucking child molester. And you know what, I never even thought about it. I never thought about putting a label on anything I get up to in bed, with anyone. Politics and shit, I never had time for that. I’ve spent a hell of a lot of my adult life on other planets, this is just not a thing in my life. I never thought I was. . . I don’t know. I just never saw it coming, was my point. So, you know, baruch ata Adonai I guess."

“No,” Bruce said harshly. “What Jim did has nothing to do with God. Your brother’s issues are not God’s.”

“Yeah, well. . . Jim’s rabbi might not agree.”

Bruce got up and went back to the kitchen, but to the cabinets this time. He rummaged for a bit, then returned with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. He also grabbed a white chocolate Kit Kat from Damian’s pile. He set a glass in front of Hal and poured a finger. “Alfred’s secret stash,” he said. “He buys better liquor than I do, truth is. He has a better palate, too.”

“Well line ‘em up.” 

They drank in silence, and Hal savored the whiskey. It really was some good liquor. Bruce got up and threw another log on the fire, and absently poked at it. He came and sat back down and poured himself some more whiskey. As it turned out Bruce could really put it away.

“You know what’s funny,” Hal said. “I haven’t told anyone about Jim. Haven’t even told my best friends what happened. And here I’ve told you for some reason.”

“Well, it all works out, I told you the truth about Talia.”

“So what you’re saying is, you roll on me, I can roll on you.”

Bruce raised his glass. “To mutually assured destruction,” he said. 

Hal knocked his glass against Bruce’s. “Mutually assured destruction,” he said. 

“How’s the leg?”

“Better.”

“Liar. Why don’t you just sleep here tonight, instead of dragging yourself down to the carriage house?”

“Nah, I’m good,” he said, hauling himself up with a groan. “That mattress is calling my name.”

“Okay,” Bruce said. He was still sitting at the table, staring into the fire, clearly intending to nurse his whiskey for a while. 

“Hey Bruce,” Hal said at the door. 

“Yeah?”

“Happy Halloween.”

Bruce gave a long slow smile, his real one. “Happy Halloween,” he said.

* * *

He was tired as he made his way down the side path to the carriage house. Tired, and he wasn’t paying attention, so he wasn’t prepared, and when he first saw the flash of yellow, for a half-instant he thought it was like before, like earlier this evening when he had seen the yellow flashlight of the kids trick-or-treating. 

“Well hello there Hal,” said the pulsing yellow figure perched on the garden wall by his door. Hal had his ring up and a protective construct formed before the first syllable was even out of its mouth. 

“Not possible,” Hal said. He hated the shake in his voice. 

“Apparently possible,” it said. It crossed its legs and gave a wicked grin. “It” he said, but it was him. The fucking motherfucker was dressed as him. A Lantern in every respect, but bathed in yellow light. Hal Jordan’s face was staring back at him, Hal Jordan’s body. A mockery of him. 

“Missed me, Hal?” Parallax hissed, and Hal lashed out with his construct, and the apparition shattered, evaporated, faded to nothingness. 

His chest was pounding. He twisted his ring and was bathed in darkness again. It was like it had not happened. Everything in him wanted to say that it had not happened. 

But it had.


	5. Chapter 5

The day after Halloween was, predictably, a day in bed. But that was the way things were for him right now, and he was learning the rhythm of it. He had pushed way beyond his body’s limits the day before, and it was possible to do that on occasion, but it came at a price. 

“Hey Carol,” he said into the phone, when he rolled over and had focused enough to talk. Even reaching for the phone and lifting it to his face hurt. “I’m gonna be a little late on those specs, if that’s okay. I’ll have them by noon tomorrow, I promise. Sorry for the extra day. Call me when you’re up.”

He knew Carol would not give him shit about being late with his work, because he had been on time or better with everything he had done for her so far. It was a pity job, and he knew it. But at the end of the day, a pity job was a job, and he needed the money, so technical work it was. He was actually good at it, was the thing, and it was. . . it was bearable. Working remotely was easier than working at the airfield would have been. He couldn’t really handle being around planes right now. 

He wondered what would happen, about his pilot’s license. He wouldn’t pass the physical at renewal, obviously, and for insurance purposes there was no way Carol could let him near a cockpit. But for the moment, he was at least technically still licensed. At least he thought he was. He wondered what the expiration on his license was. He had never thought to look, before. Probably not a good idea to look now. 

He lay in bed thinking about last night, and what he had seen. Trying to puzzle it out. Because one of two things was true, and they were equally shit-tastic: either Parallax had indeed returned, and had chosen Halloween (of all fucking nights) to mess with him; or, Parallax had not returned, and he was hallucinating the whole fucking thing, which meant that he had much, much bigger problems than physical illness. He should call Leslie. He could find out from her if anything he was taking might have hallucinatory side effects. How would that conversation go, exactly? 

He rolled over and slept some more, and alternated between the bed and the couch for the rest of his day. Toward early evening he got a text from Bruce.

 _Come to the cave when you can_ , it read. _There’s something I’d like you to take a look at._

 _Last time you said that you gave me a house_ , he replied.

_I’m not giving you my cave._

_Cheapskate. OK if I come tomorrow? Kind of a long walk today_

_I thought that might be the case. May the cave come to you?_

_Sure._

He left the period on there to demonstrate his reluctant willingness, but Bruce was probably oblivious to the finer points of texting punctuation. He considered putting on something other than his sweatpants, but it was probably not going to be possible. He meant to get up and tidy a bit, or at least move to the couch, but he dozed off again. He woke to a minor earthquake, which was Bruce sitting on his bed. 

“Eat,” Bruce said, tossing him a paper sack. “Meatball sub from Finch’s in the city.”

“Was this a ploy to bring me food?” 

“It was not. But I figured you were too tired to fix yourself anything, and I need you on your game. Here, take a look at this.”

Hal rubbed at his face and sat up. He had forgotten a shirt, he realized. Bruce was typing on his laptop, calling up data or something. “This is video feed from night before last, in Singapore,” Bruce said. 

“This is why you came home early?”

“I came home early to talk to you, because I need a Lantern’s perspective.”

Hal pulled the wrapper down on his sub, and tried a bite. Not bad. “You’ve got a couple of those,” he said. “Why not just ask John?”

“Because I’m asking you. Watch,” Bruce said, and hit play.

It was security feed from one of the buildings in the downtown area, evidently. Tall sleek skyscrapers. Batman perched on the ledge of one of the buildings. A slight middle-aged woman was walking along another ledge, as unconcerned as though she were not hundreds of feet in the air. The wind whipped her yellow dress.

“Jumper?” Hal said. Bruce shook his head. 

The woman kept walking along the ledge. He saw Batman swing across to intercept her. She pushed him out of the way. Her face was glassy, remote. Batman grabbed her arms and shook her. She pushed him away with such force that he staggered back – and this was a woman maybe one-fourth his size. She continued walking to the edge. She turned and the camera caught her face. All of a sudden the glassy look was gone. She was confused, terrified. She said something in Chinese, looking wildly around her, screaming. Bruce hit pause.

“I was able to catch her when she fell,” he said. “I’m showing you this footage because it’s the clearest example of it, though an innocuous enough incident. I was there to investigate an arms cartel shipment, and with any luck to break the cartel’s back. But everywhere I turned, I was fought off not by the hired guns I expected, but by ordinary people. They didn’t seem to know what they were doing. In the middle of a fight, they would come to, just like that woman did.”

“Huh,” Hal said.

“Several of them died, mostly by their own hands. I was able to get labs on their autopsies, through connections with the coroner’s office in Singapore. Some samples I was able to take myself. Their results and mine match perfectly – absolutely nothing unusual in their bloodstream at all.”

“And you’re thinking?”

“I’m thinking that my lab and the one in Singapore are state of the art, but if it’s an alien virus of some sort, or any sort of alien tech at all, we might not be able to detect it. But the ring would. I need a Lantern’s help. I’ve run every tox screen I know of, but I’m worried about the ones I don’t know.”

Hal hit play and watched the video feed again. Something in the woman’s face was familiar. “What are you thinking?” Bruce said. 

“I’m thinking. . . nothing. I don’t know.”

Bruce set a small plastic-topped vial on the bedside table. There was a dark finger of blood in the bottom. “Can you analyze this for me?”

Hal sighed. “Look,” he said. “I don’t see any evidence that there is any kind of alien involvement here. I mean. . . did you see anything that made you think that?”

Bruce was just looking at him. “Other than people acting weird?” Hal said. 

“You think I don’t have enough evidence here to warrant a Lantern investigation,” Bruce said slowly.

“Correct. That is what I think. And even if you did – if you did, I would say, great, get in touch with John. I mean, I get that I am a convenient walk from the office, but I am not an active duty Lantern right now. John is.”

“You think I should ask someone else.”

“Yes, that is what I think. Is there some reason you’re repeating everything I say back to me?”

“Well maybe if I keep doing that, you’ll hear what you’re saying. Hal, this is a simple blood analysis I’m asking for. There’s no reason that—”

“Oh is that it,” Hal said, pushing his sandwich aside. He struggled to get up. “I get it now. You’re asking for it. Is this, what, is this my rent charge or something? Is that what the expectation is here?”

Bruce closed his laptop. “For God’s sake,” he said sharply. “Get your head out of your ass for once in your self-absorbed life. I’m not asking a special favor, I’m asking you to do your damn job.”

“It’s not my job, all right? Why is this so hard to understand?”

“The ring is on your goddamn hand,” Bruce said. “If you’re so convinced it’s not your job, why are you still wearing the ring? So show me how much it’s not your job, and take it off. Go on, toss it away, get rid of it why don’t you.”

“Leave me alone,” Hal rasped. 

“Leave you alone,” Bruce said. “People have been leaving you alone your whole life. Isn’t ‘alone’ the whole point of you? No family, no responsibilities, nothing but Hal Jordan riding his cosmic motorcycle into the intergalactic sunset.”

“Fuck you.” 

“And now this. The Marchand’s has given you your final excuse to check out, hasn’t it? Let the galaxy be someone else’s responsibility now, Hal Jordan wants to be alone.”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

Bruce rose. “Of course,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to interfere with your alone time. I’m sure there’s a corner of this apartment in which you haven’t sat to wallow in self-pity yet. Oh look, I think you missed a spot over there.”

Hal controlled his breathing with difficulty, aware he was close to lashing out. He could feel the ring itching to break something. Bruce’s face would be a nice place to start. “Out,” he managed, and Bruce complied. He heard Bruce’s light tread all the way down the stairs. Heard him slam the door at the bottom of the stairs. 

Fucking Bruce. Fucking, fucking Bruce. Bruce had stabbed in every knife he had to hand, had finally let all his contempt ooze out of him. Self-absorbed. Final excuse to check out. What the fuck did he know about anything.

The worst of it was, he couldn’t even call Barry or Oliver to complain about Bruce. Oliver thought he was nuts for living there, for one thing. “You need to live on the east coast, fine,” Ollie had said, when he had told him. “But why there, of all goddamn places?”

“Because I need to be in Gotham? Because he offered? Because it’s free? I don’t know Ol, pick a reason.”

“But why not stay with me and Dinah?”

“Because—I don’t know, because you’re my best friend, and that would be weird, all right? Bruce and me, it’s more of a business-type thing. He doesn’t expect me to be his friend or anything like that.”

“Oh, well, excuse me. I’ll just take my pain-in-the-ass expectations of friendship elsewhere then.”

“Come on, you know that’s not what I meant.”

“Do I? Do I really, Hal? Because I try for six months to get you to talk to me about whatever the fuck is going on with you, and you shut me down every time I try. And when you finally tell me, you tell me you’re moving in with Bruce. None of this makes any sense to me, no fucking sense at all.”

They were sitting in Oliver’s car drinking coffee. Hal stared out the window and gripped the door handle. “Wow,” Hal said. “I am so sorry. I didn’t realize this was such a tough time for you right now. I’ll work harder to make sure the total destruction of my life makes better sense to you.”

“You made your point,” Oliver growled. “But Jesus Christ. Moving into the Manor? Without even letting me know you needed help?”

“I cannot believe you are choosing to be butthurt over this. You are aware I have slightly larger problems than where I live, right?”

“What the fuck does that mean? You mean your. . . thing?”

Hal had rolled his eyes. “Yeah, Ollie,” he sighed. “My thing.” Oliver seemed to think Hal had a vague and undefined sickness – his “thing” – that someone would eventually find the cure for, and then everything would be normal again. Ollie thought it was like the flu. Ollie had been sick maybe two days in his whole life, so his frame of reference for even short-term illness was a narrow one. When it came to long-term disability, he was completely clueless.

But even Oliver’s cluelessness was preferable to Barry’s fumbling nervousness about the whole thing, or his morbid curiosity about Hal’s living arrangements. “So what is it like, living at the Manor?” Barry had asked him, just last week, and Hal had shrugged.

“I mean, I don’t, actually,” he said. “I live on the property, not actually in the house.”

“Yeah, but,” Barry had persisted. “Come on, I’ve been dying to know. Is it. . . weird? Awesome? Because in my head it’s part ninja lair, part Hugh Hefner lying around the pool draped in Playboy bunnies.”

“It’s. . . I dunno, it’s just like a normal house. It’s fine, Bar.”

“In other words, you’re not going to tell me shit.”

“There’s nothing to tell. There’s. . .” He cast about for something to tell Barry. “There’s, okay, there’s more people around than I had thought there would be. Lots of people in and out all the time.”

“Oh yeah,” Barry said, “I bet there would be. That does sound cool though. When I was growing up I always wished for a big family, especially after it was just my mom and me. I used to look at my friends with brothers and sisters and feel so jealous. Like your kind of family, that was what I wanted. The mom and the dad and all the kids, like, I don’t know, playing basketball all the time or something.”

Hal fell silent at that. Funny how Barry thought his childhood had been so fucking idyllic. Funny how he had let Barry think that. “There is a basketball court,” Hal offered. “Not just a hoop, but a full court.”

“How cool would that be,” Barry said. “Do you get to play on it?”

He stared at Barry. He saw the moment when it hit Barry. “I mean – sorry,” he said, panicked. “Shit. I didn’t mean to – I mean, obviously you’re probably not playing on it much.”

“Probably not.”

“How—how are things?” Barry said, with that nervous air he got whenever the subject of Hal’s disease came up. It had happened to him more than once, and not just with Barry. Barry reacted with a vague kind of guilt, as though he were embarrassed by his own extraordinary physical ability. 

“Things are fine,” Hal said. 

“Fuck, I’m so sorry, I know I’m fucking this up. I’m sorry I don’t—I don’t always know what to say.”

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” Lather, rinse, repeat. Barry would try to ignore it, then say something that embarrassed him, then fall all over himself trying to fix it, and by the end of it, Hal was always exhausted. So he couldn’t really call him up, because he would hear that nervous tightening in Barry’s voice that meant he was concentrating on not saying anything wrong. And if he called Ollie—well, Ollie would just say something like “fucking told you not to live with that crazy bastard,” which would not be helpful. 

Of course, after last night, and his. . . whatever he had seen, chances were Bruce was not the only crazy bastard around.

* * *

He walked into the cave the next morning. He trooped across the lawn to the cave’s back entrance, because he did not feel like going through the house and having to talk to people. Never any telling which people would be around – on any given day, could be nobody, or it could be seventeen thousand different people. No one should ever live in a house that had more entrances and exits than they could keep track of. 

“Here,” Hal said, setting the vial beside Bruce, next to his keyboard. The man looked like he hadn’t slept at all. “Full blood analysis. It’s not a quick process – can take the ring up to an hour, for something like that where we don’t know what we’re looking for. But it’s clean. There’s no trace of anything out of the ordinary, in that sample at least.”

Bruce reached into a drawer and pulled out more vials. He set seven more in front of Hal. 

“Uh huh,” Hal said. “Well, great. I’m guessing you want the same thing done on all of these?”

“If you have time.”

“I’ve got time. I stayed up most of the night getting reports done for Carol, so my schedule’s open.”

“There’s a workstation over there, if you’d like.”

“Sure,” he said. “And. . . listen. Yesterday, I didn’t. . . I’m not dealing with things well, is what I’m trying to say.”

Bruce was doing that wordless thing he did, where he just sat there and watched you. Before he had known better, Hal had thought of it as sociopathic. Now he knew it was the opposite. “Anyway,” Hal said. “Pity party over, I guess. Time to get to work.”

Bruce nodded, and Hal went to the free workstation and lined up the blood samples. They worked in silence, punctuated only by Bruce occasionally getting up for more coffee. He brought Hal a mug too – with cream and sugar, so that was appreciated. He stood and watched Hal work for a while, watched him sweep through ring projections with his finger, run through the various symbols that were probably inscrutable to Bruce. 

“You’re not translating as you go,” Bruce observed. 

“Nah, I usually don’t. Easier just to do it at the end. Some of this stuff, there’s not a one-for-one translation into any Earth language anyway.”

“And yet you made a C in high school Spanish.”

“And yet you are the weirdo who somehow knows my high school transcript.”

“No, it was just a lucky guess.”

Hal gave a sharp laugh, and Bruce buried his smile in his coffee. “So, question,” Hal said. “If I don’t find anything, what’s the next step?”

“The next step is, I return to the scene. Try to locate any environmental factors. Those people were acting under compulsion, I’m sure of it. I just have to find the source of that compulsion.”

Hal said nothing. It was just a coincidence, was the thing. He had seen – or hallucinated – Parallax, and now this. They weren’t necessarily connected events. He told himself it would be irresponsible to mention a possibility like that, when he wasn’t even sure. “John Stewart is a good man,” Bruce said. “And a good Lantern.”

Hal nodded. “Good,” he said. “I’m glad he’s working out.”

“Hal. I asked for your help instead of his because I needed someone I trust. I like John just fine, but he’s not you. The League misses you. The League needs you.”

He bent his head to study the sample he was working with. “I can’t,” he said.

“I know,” Bruce said. Hal pulled a stool over so he wouldn’t have to look at Bruce, and also because his hip was still hurting like a motherfucker. He was days away from saying yes to that cane. Bruce brought another stool over so Hal could rest his leg on that, and lifted Hal’s leg for him, putting it at just the right angle. Bruce left his hand resting on Hal’s thigh.

“Want me to work on it?”

“God, please.”

He went to his physical therapy appointments every week, and never missed a one. It was hard to tell if it was doing any good, and it never felt as good as when Bruce worked on him. Sometimes he wished he could get Bruce to work on his whole body, but that would probably be a weird thing to ask. His back had started to hurt, and that was a new development Leslie was tracking closely. 

“Take a break when you need to,” Bruce said.

“Yeah well, same to you. Quick question, do you ever sleep?”

“Sleeping has never gone particularly well for me. There?”

“Fuck yes.”

Bruce’s fingers dug in harder. Hal let his head tip back. “You ought to let Alfred work on you some,” Bruce said. “He’s better than I am. He can confer with Leslie and your current physical therapist, and maybe give you a session every day. I’m not sure this once a week schedule is very helpful.”

“Yeah, well, she’s very good. And, if I’m being honest, drop-dead fucking gorgeous.”

“Oh well in that case. Here, lean forward.”

“Hang on,” Hal said. “Look at this.” He swiped at a screen projection. “I didn’t think anything of it with the first two. All of these readings were within normal ranges, but it’s not that the readings are abnormal, it’s that they are all at the exact same level. That’s just not right.”

“Which reading?” Bruce was leaning closer, trying to decipher the symbols on the screen. 

“I think it’s B-12 levels, but I’m not completely sure. It’s definitely a vitamin level of some sort. Like I said, within normal range, but high normal, according to this. It wouldn’t ping a tox screen, but for three different samples to be at the exact same level? Weird.”

“B-12 would certainly account for heightened energy level, though not the heightened strength I was seeing. Possibly high enough to give the subject a kind of euphoria.”

“Possibly.”

“So,” Bruce said. “This might point us back to an undetected substance, leaving this as its only detectable trace. A rapidly dissipating substance might leave no trace other than stray footprints like this one. Delivery system would be the only question here.”

Hal said nothing, but continued to swipe through the screens. He was relieved, that it might be something like that. It made it less likely that it was Parallax. Or a Parallax-like entity, because whatever he had seen, it had not been Parallax. He knew that much. Parallax was not alive, or at least as unalive as an immortal entity could be, so it wasn’t possible. 

Bruce thought he hadn’t wanted to help out because he was all sad about not being much of a Lantern any more, or some shit like that. The truth was, he had recognized the look on those people’s faces. He had seen that look before. He had been that look before. So he had turned from it in a convulsion of fear and denial, not wanting to see. But that had not been rational. Parallax had been a hallucination, probably brought on by pain and exhaustion and his own self-doubt. These lab results were something concrete to work on, and they pointed away from Parallax-like mind control. Maybe. Possibly. There was still the look on those people’s faces, but that. . . that could be anything. 

“Time for a bit of a break, I think,” Alfred announced, coming down the stairs with a tray. Hal reached a quick construct to help him steady the tray on his way down. “Thank you, Master Harold. We have cucumber sandwiches and watercress soup, and lemon tea. Just the thing I think for those who may have missed breakfast, particularly since I notice, Master Bruce, that your tray is untouched.”

Hal saw Bruce glance quickly to the tray still sitting beside him at the monitor, as if surprised to see it. It was the same startled look he had seen Bruce give food before – the sort of “what is this strange thing doing here” look, like he had forgotten what food was for. He wondered how much of Alfred’s life was dominated by the goal of getting Bruce to put food in his mouth. 

“While it is on my mind,” Alfred was saying, “and because I can see all the signs that this will become the sort of investigation where you bury yourself alive and only emerge a month later, I will remind you that tomorrow night is the benefit gala, and your presence for at least part of the evening will be expected.”

“I thought that was Friday,” Bruce said with a frown.

“And so it is. Today being Thursday, of course.”

Bruce sighed. “All right, yes, I’ll be there.” He reached for his coffee mug, but there was a gentle hand resting on it, stopping him. 

“Three bites of food first,” Alfred said softly, and Hal knew this was not a conversation for his ears, so he concentrated on his scans and pretended not to listen.  
“Oh, and Master Harold,” Alfred said, on his way up the stairs. “I do hope you will make an appearance tomorrow night. It is always such a lovely event, the climax of the social season really. The weather is supposed to be unseasonably balmy, for November. You should at least come see a little of it.”

“I don’t think that’s really Hal’s scene,” Bruce said.

“Oh really,” Hal said. “Not really my scene, huh. What’s that supposed to mean? You think I can’t go to a fancy party? Trying to keep me locked in the attic like what’s her name?”

Bruce sighed. “I was trying to give you an out, you idiot. Come to the party if you want to. No one’s trying to treat you like Bertha Rochester, for God’s sake.”

“Who’s that?”

“You’re the one who made the Jane Eyre allusion.”

“Oh, right. Yeah, I was really going more for the V.C. Andrews, but you classed that right up. Okay Alfred, sign me up, I’ll be there.”

“Excellent, sir. We have any number of tuxedos that ought to do for you, if you’d like to stop by this evening for a bit of a try-on.”

“Oh,” Hal said. “Right. Sure. So this is a. . . black-tie kind of thing?”

“I tried to warn you,” Bruce muttered into his monitor. “Were you hoping to wear your formal pair of sweatpants?”

“Hey now,” Hal said, but Bruce’s barb hit home because it was at least partially true – his wardrobe had taken a bit of a downturn in the last few months. “Alfred, I’ll be upstairs in a minute. Break out the diamond tiaras and shit.”

“I shall find one that brings out your eyes.”

“Aces,” Hal said. “I’m gonna look fly.”

“Your vocabulary is excruciating,” Bruce said, and went back to his screen. But Hal noticed he had at least eaten a few bites of his sandwich, and if he also noticed that Bruce rearranged a bit of the lettuce to make it look like he had eaten more than he had – well, he was no snitch.


	6. Chapter 6

Alfred was right about the party: it really was something to see. The set-up went on all day beforehand, with the big white tents being set up and strung with lights, and heaters scattered around just in case the November weather chose not to co-operate. Hal fixed himself a sandwich and enjoyed watching the commotion, from the windows of his apartment. He meant to slip on his tux and head down there when evening came, but he ended up falling asleep on his sofa for a while, which he hadn’t meant to do. That was happening to him more and more, that the exhaustion would just overtake him like that. So he fell asleep as the sun was setting, and woke to the sound of music and distant laughter. The lawns were lit up bright enough that the windows of the carriage house were glowing with it.

So he put on his tux – and Alfred had done him up right, he didn’t want to think about how expensive this tux he had borrowed was – and went down to score some free food and liquor. He had definitely never seen a party like this. There must be like a thousand people at the Manor, and all of them were beautiful. He wondered how many famous people were mingling around at the canapé bars. There was a band out by the pool, and people dancing there, and a band inside, and a third band out on the terrace. Bourbon flowed like a river, and he was pleasantly buzzed after just one tour of the house – every time he turned around, there was a waiter pushing a champagne flute into his hand, and another one putting a whiskey into his other hand. 

“I’m so sorry about the other night,” a stunning woman breathed into his ear, as he stood loading his plate with crab.

“Oh—ah—you know, that’s okay,” he said.

“Thank you for being such a sweetheart about the whole thing,” she said. She still had not let go of his arm, and was pressed up against him. She was wearing a dress that plunged to her navel, and that perfectly matched her close-cropped auburn hair. She made his mouth water. 

“Well,” he said, “that’s just the way I am, I guess. I don’t let things bother me.”

“You’re precious,” she said. “I could just eat you up.” And she leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, a lingering kiss with a flick of tongue behind it. He moved to set down his crab plate and maneuver her into a more private space, already having the moral debate with himself about this particular situation – was she drunk? Or just spectacularly near-sighted? And did he really care?

“Oh God,” she said, her grip on his arm tightening. “It’s Christopher, I think he’s seen us. I have to go. Meet me at—”

And then she was pulled into the crowd, her sequined dress a flash and a sparkle that moved through the press of people faster than he could track.

“No, wait, where do you—”

He sighed. Goddammit. His best chance at getting laid in six months. Fuck you, Christopher.

After a while it occurred to him he hadn’t actually seen anyone he knew at this party so far – not Bruce, or Dick, or even Alfred. Surely the host had to be around here somewhere? So he wandered the house some more, then back out to the gardens, which looked beautiful all strung with lights and glowing. There were giant lily pad thingies floating in the pool, and they were lit with some kind of lights underneath. 

“Hey,” he said to a man standing next to him at the bar by the pool, while he was waiting for a refill. “Have you seen Bruce around this evening?”

“Who?” the man said. 

“Bruce Wayne,” Hal said. “You know, the guy who owns this place?”

The man looked blank. “Sorry,” he said. “No no, I said a double,” he said to the bartender. 

“You left me,” breathed the woman into his ear. She was gripping his arm again. “I had a terrible time finding you, where did you go? Follow me,” she said, and wow, she was strong. She didn’t let go of him once, all the way back up the stone steps of the terrace to the house. She slipped past the press of people and found an opening in one of the French doors to the right. 

“In here,” she said, and he followed, because why the hell not. She slammed the doors shut behind them. It was the passage that led from the kitchens to the garage. She pressed him into the wall. He let his hands wander down to her amazing ass.

“I don’t know how much time we have,” she murmured. “We’ll have to be quick, darling.”

“Yeah,” he sighed, cursing himself. “I, uh, actually can’t do this. Sorry. I’m not—I’m not who you think I am, whoever that lucky fucking bastard is. And I think you are possibly very, very drunk, so. . . this is gonna have to be a no.”

She reared back and looked at him. “Oh my,” she said. “Aren’t you just too precious for words.”

“No, you’re not understanding. I’m not—”

She leaned closer, pressing every inch of her body against his. He could feel her breasts against him. Her mouth rested on his ear. “No shit, sweetheart,” she whispered. “It was a ploy to get the hottest man at the party all to myself. How’d I do?”

“Amazing,” he said, and gripped her face, bringing her mouth to his, sinking into the lush heat of her mouth. Christ, she was already grinding against him. Too late it occurred to him he hadn’t been with anyone other than his right hand for the better part of a year, and this might go really, really fast. He needed to slow down his body’s reaction here, but she was definitely not encouraging the whole go slow thing. The slit down the front of her dress was matched by a slit up the side, and she had tugged her dress up a little to allow more room for her legs to straddle him. 

“Hang on,” he managed, as her mouth slid from his jaw to his neck, licking him the whole way. He was this close to coming. He gripped her wrist.

“This way,” he said, pulling her down the hallway. “There’s a place I know.” And he tried the door to the small storage pantry, which was right off to the left. It was unlocked. Alfred never kept much in here, and there was plenty of room. She kicked the door shut behind them and was on him again.

“You’re a genius,” she breathed. “Now come on, let’s go.” She was straddling him up against the wall, and he gripped her hips as she rocked back and forth. Her fingers dug into him, fisted his shirt. She was sucking on his neck. 

“Holy Christ,” he panted. 

“Yeah,” she said. She was undoing his zip, palming the length of him. “Oh I see I made the right choice here,” she said, and he groaned, thunked his head back against the wall. “So since your brain appears to be melting out your ears I’m gonna call the plays here, that okay, sport?”

“Whatever you want,” he said, and he had never meant anything more in his life.

“This,” she whispered, straddling him again. And she rode him to her first orgasm, her cunt sliding on him, her hands pressing him to the wall. They left on all their clothes, and somehow it was hotter that way – the silk of his boxers (which yes, okay, that was a little addiction he had picked up from Bruce) and the satin of her thong giving them just that little bit of friction on top of all the heat and wet. When she came the second time, he could feel it even more – felt the wet soaking through to his cock, the low rich vibration of her groan, the convulsion of her thighs against him. 

“Come on, sugar,” she moaned, pressing her cunt against him, and he could feel her still twitching. 

“Shit, I can’t—” he panted, and then he came, and his veins were filled with hot light and her warm soft laugh. He thought she might be a little pissed he had just come down her leg, but she only reached behind him to a shelf with paper towels on it and cleaned them both off. She rearranged her dress and leaned against the wall next to him. 

“Holy fuck,” he said, and she grinned at him. “That was—you are—”

“You gonna be okay there?”

“Anyone ever tell you you look exactly like Scarlett Johansson?”

She laughed again. “Oh my God, I’m going to eat you with a spoon, you are so adorable,” she said, leaning in for another slow kiss. He used the opportunity to pull her close again, and yes, to brace himself on her a little bit, because while sex against a wall was fine in the abstract, it had maybe not been the best choice for his body, and he could feel that leg wanting to give. Please, if he could just stay upright a little longer, please God. 

“So how’d you know this was here?” she said.

“I live here,” he said, because his brain was still too looped from orgasm to even think about lying. “Well, not _here_ here. In the carriage house. I’m a friend of Bruce’s. Not a close friend, just—acquaintances, really.”

“An acquaintance he lets stay in his house,” she said. “A mystery man, as well as a gentleman, I see.” She brushed her lips against his cheek, and righted herself. “All right,” she sighed. “I’d better get back out there, I guess.”

“Hey, Christopher’s not real, is he? I mean, any reason you can’t hang out here a bit more, maybe?”

She gave a lopsided smile. “With a spoon,” she said, leaning in for another peck on his cheek, and she had slipped out the door.

“I’m Hal, by the way,” he called, but she was already gone. He let himself slide to the floor then. He wondered what would happen if Alfred found him here the next morning, slumped against the floor with his cock hanging out, surrounded by crumpled paper towels full of cum. After a while he hauled himself up and cleaned up their mess, and shut the door of the pantry behind him. The party appeared to be in full swing, with no sign of stopping anytime soon. He stood at the windows for a while, wondering if he would ever see Bruce or anyone he knew. 

He gave up and decided to head home. He took the back path around the outside of the house, where he could be hidden by hedges. He was aching like a son of a bitch, and he had just started to feel good about falling onto that mattress when he stepped out the elevator door into his apartment and found—

“Excuse us,” a female voice said, from over on his bed for Christ’s sake. “This place is taken, find your own.”

“What the—” Hal stared in outrage. There were people having sex. On his bed. On his mattress. “Yeah, I know this place is taken,” he said loudly. “Get the fuck out, are you even kidding me with this shit?”

“Hey buddy,” a bleary male voice said, emerging from the blankets. His blankets. “Wanna come join?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Hal sighed, and gave up. 

He made his way across the lawns to the back entrance to the cave, figuring the house would be too crowded to make a discreet disappearing act into the cave from there. He had finally realized that the reason he hadn’t seen Bruce was that the bastard had probably long since gone to ground, and he wasn’t wrong. 

“Well you sorry son of a bitch,” Hal said. Predictably, there Bruce sat, running some kind of analysis on his screens. His tux was partially unbuttoned, his tie undone, and he looked like he hadn’t been at his party in hours. 

“There you are,” Bruce said. “How was the party?”

“Interesting,” Hal said, easing into a chair. “Aren’t you at all concerned someone’s going to wonder where you are?”

“Not in the least. My presence is entirely incidental to events like this.”

“In other words, Alfred gave you permission to flee.”

“He did. I’m surprised to see you still about, though. I thought you would long since be in bed.”

“Well, that’s the thing,” Hal said. “Here we come to the difficulty.”

“Which is?”

“My bed is occupied,” he said, and Bruce threw back his head and laughed, the real laugh that made his eyes crinkle.

“You asshole,” Hal said. “You might have mentioned this was a possibility.”

“Sorry,” Bruce said, with a laugh that said he was anything but. “I should have warned you to lock your doors. At a certain point in a party like this, people inevitably start scouting for beds. The carriage house is always a popular choice.”

“There are people having sex on my mattress right now. My mattress. My sheets. I’m going to have to burn everything. I’m going to get a disease.”

“Oh relax, I’ll have Alfred chase them out in the morning. He always goes around with a weed torch the morning after, clearing out the stragglers. How goes the party out there?”

“Still roaring along. That is some next-level Gatsby shit you’ve got going on here. Someone literally called me sport, by the way. Excellent liquor though. How much do you reckon you spend on alcohol alone, for a shindig like this?”

“No idea. Alfred handles all of that.”

Hal leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Speaking of the liquor, maybe he had had a bit too much of it. It had been hard to keep track of all the champagne and whiskey, on his various circuits of the house. Maybe she hadn’t been the drunk one – maybe that had been him.

“Hey,” he said. “Do you know a woman who looks just like Scarlett Johansson?”

Bruce was frowning at his screen. “No,” he said. “I know Scarlett Johansson, though.”

“No shit, really?”

“No shit really. She should be here tonight, or at least she told me she was going to be.”

Hal stared at him, trying to take in that information. “Scarlett Johansson. . . was at. . . this party. Tonight. Tonight, Scarlett Johansson was here.”

“Mm hm. You wouldn’t feel like running a tox screen on a new sample, would you? Just for the purposes of cross-referencing?”

He had just had sex with Scarlett Johansson. It was all his brain could think. His brain was shouting it. Holy shit holy shit holy shit. She had called him adorable. “Um, sure,” he said. “Maybe. . . in the morning?”

Bruce glanced at him. “You look terrible,” he said. “You should just sleep down here.”

“What, like curl up on the stalactites over there?”

“Stalagmites, for one thing. And for another, I’ve got a bedroom down here, which you’re welcome to use.”

“Wait, what? You’ve got a whole bedroom down here? You’re kidding me. How come I never knew that?”

“Because I don’t advertise it, that’s why. It has a concealed entrance, with a fingerprint scanner. It’s quite comfortable, too.”

“Nah, I don’t want to put you out of your bed, come on.”

“Oh I’ll be fine. I’m always careful to lock my bedroom door at an event like this, so my bed upstairs will at least be free of late-night invaders.”

“Then in that case I will take you up on it. And in future I will not only lock my door, I will wrap the carriage house in concertina wire and tie a few rabid Alsatians out front. How often do you throw parties like this anyway?”

“Hm?” Bruce had gone back to his monitor. “Oh, once or twice a year. I suppose I never think about it. Growing up here, you get used to the parties. I used to watch from my upstairs window, after my bedtime.”

“Ever see anything you weren’t supposed to?”

He gave a short laugh. “Probably. But I wasn’t really paying attention to that. I always loved to watch my mother. She would wear diamonds in her hair, and her hair was so dark that the diamonds looked like fire, from a distance.”

Hal was quiet for a minute. He watched the analysis Bruce was running on the screen – more data from the victims in Indonesia. Bruce had hit a dead end with the bloodwork, he knew. Now he was busy on the hypnotism angle again. “You do that a lot, you know,” Hal said. He tugged his tie loose and pulled it free, unbuttoning his collar.

“What’s that?”

“Talk about your mother. I’ve never heard you talk about your father, though. No big deal, I was just. . . noticing.”

Bruce clicked a few more keys, and Hal assumed the silence was his answer. Bruce was sipping his coffee, because the man drank coffee at all hours of the day and night. Probably at this point his body was impervious to the effects. 

“I mean,” Hal said. “I guess there are dads and there are dads. Because probably I already know your dad, the truth is.”

Bruce set his coffee down and concentrated on his screen. “None of my business, huh,” Hal said. “Well, that’s fair. All right, if the offer still stands I’m gonna go crash on your bed, if you point the way.”

Bruce nodded at an unassuming juncture of stone on the far wall, in a dark corner. “There,” he said. “There’s a small touchpad on the wall. Just place your hand on it, it will open. I’m going to stay up working for a while.” 

“Ok cool. So wait, my fingerprints will open it?”

“Yes. I set all touchpads in the house to admit your prints, shortly after you moved in.”

“That’s a Batfamily declaration of love, right there. Wait – all the touchpads? Where are the rest?”

Bruce’s mouth quirked up. “You’ll just have to find them, won’t you?”

“You’ve probably got your underwear drawer rigged up to a fingerprint pad, don’t you. Or no wait, retinal scanner I bet. All right, Imma crash now. Thanks for the bed, and in case you were wondering, you throw extremely weird parties.”

“Don’t I know it,” Bruce said, absently drinking more coffee and staring into the blue wash of his monitor.


	7. Chapter 7

He woke up the next morning knowing that he had hit a wall. 

He lay there in Bruce’s immense pleasure palace of a bed – and hadn’t that been a revelation, because when Bruce had said he could use the bedroom in the cave, for some crazy reason Hal had assumed it would be like everything else in the cave, that is, fanatically Spartan and made of rock or metal. Like, he had assumed maybe a camp bed in the corner, a cot with a threadbare blanket thrown over it kind of thing. He should have known better, though. The rock wall had slid back to a narrow passage, and a few rough stairs, and then there had been another door, and behind that, had been this room that looked like the captain’s quarters on the fucking starship Enterprise: an enormous round bed that was practically wall to wall, and lights that glowed inside the sleek paneled walls.

“Holy fuck,” he muttered, and a disembodied voice spoke.

“What time shall I set your alarm?” it said, in that unnaturally calm AI voice. 

“Don’t you dare set an alarm,” he said, sinking into a bed that defied description. He had no idea about sheets and things, but these didn’t feel like anything that had ever touched his body, some kind of unholy silk or something. The rug on the floor was a long-haired shaggy thing, like a sheep someone had skinned and then tossed on the ground, and his toes had dug into it gratefully. 

“Well Bruce,” he said. “You are definitely and for sure a very strange man.” He wrapped himself in the heavenly sheets and went right to sleep, and when he woke up he knew.

He enjoyed lying in the bed for a bit. It was good place to be honest with yourself, this weird womb-like space. Like a sensory deprivation chamber, and he wondered if that was the point. He knew that moving at all today was going to be a struggle, and he knew why. He knew exactly why. He had done more walking than he had really thought about, yesterday at the party – all across the lawns, and around the house several times, and back to the terrace, and then down to the cave. It had been more than his body had wanted to do, and because his muscles were working so hard to keep that left leg from buckling, it had worn him right the fuck out.

So he knew. It was time. 

There was only his rumpled tux from last night. He looked around for a closet or something like that. The walls were sleek and white, covered in some sort of glass-like paneling. He pressed a hand to a panel, and it lit up. “Interesting,” he said. He pressed a button that said closet, and the panel slid back. He had half-expected it to be full of Batsuits, but it was a few unassuming shelves of soft sweatpants, T shirts, and cords. Figuring Bruce wouldn’t mind, he pulled something on. It didn’t fit quite as well as it had a few months ago, when he had first worn Bruce’s clothes, but he didn’t want to think about that. He knew he had lost some muscle mass – it was only to be expected. He could bring his weight back up. Besides, Scarlett Johansson had called him the hottest man at the party, so it couldn’t be that bad. But he had been glancing away from mirrors for some time now. 

Another panel on the wall told him it was close to eleven, which shocked him. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept that late, and it was just one more bit of evidence that he was overworking those muscles, and he needed to give his body a break. He needed to do what had to be done. 

He made his way through the cave and upstairs. The house was quiet. No sign of Alfred about, or Damian. He wondered what had happened to the kid during the party – if he had been allowed to mingle for a bit, and if he had a miniature tuxedo of his very own. Probably he did. When he reached Bruce’s bedroom door he paused. He had never actually been in here, though he knew where the room was. He knocked at the thick door hesitantly – once, then again. There was no answer. 

He tried the knob, just gently. It was open, so maybe Alfred had already been up here with a tray. He stepped inside. “Bruce?” he said. 

It was the size of a whole other house, for one thing. There was a sofa and chairs in front of a fireplace, and a whole living room in here. Other doors that probably led to bathrooms and dressing rooms. The bed was way over by the windows, and the windows were glass doors opening onto a balcony. Someone had pulled back the curtains, and sure enough, there was a breakfast cart by the windows too. Coffee and a nasty-looking green drink of some sort. 

The vast bed was a mass of rumpled brocade, with a tousled dark head just barely visible. “Bruce,” Hal said quietly. 

The head raised immediately. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry to wake you up, I just—I need some help.”

Bruce sat all the way up. One side of his hair was completely perpendicular to his head, and Hal suppressed a smile. “What’s happened?”

“Can you drive me to see Leslie?”

“Of course,” Bruce said. He swung his legs over the bed, instantly awake, and hello, Bruce slept naked. Bruce seemed unconcerned about that. He reached for the clothes that were on the back of a nearby chair. Hal wondered if Alfred had laid those out for him. 

“It’s—it’s not an emergency situation,” Hal said. “But it’s Saturday, and she’s in the office on Saturdays but only until one, so I knew I had to get going. It’s just—I’m going to need her to fit me for a brace on that leg.”

Bruce was tugging on his shirt. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Hal glanced at the tray. “At least swallow some of that disgusting whatever-it-is,” he said, “or Alfred will kill me.” 

Bruce snorted and walked past the tray, ignoring it. He padded into the bathroom, and Hal heard water running. When he re-emerged he looked like himself again, and his hair had been re-acquainted with his head. 

“Thanks,” Hal said. “I just—driving today is probably not such a great idea.”

“I know,” Bruce said. “Come on, let’s head to the city.”

Hal was quiet on the drive in, and Bruce as usual let him be. It was definitely one of Bruce’s best qualities. They were pulling up to Gotham General when Hal realized he had said nothing the whole drive, and that was kind of rude to someone who had hauled his ass out of bed just to be his chauffeur, and he really should make conversation of some kind. “So I’m pretty sure I fucked Scarlett Johansson last night,” Hal said. 

“Well, probably,” Bruce said. 

“You don’t seem shocked.”

“I’ve known her for quite a few years,” Bruce said. Hal thought about asking if he had ever slept with her, but that was a question he didn’t want to know the answer to. “Of course, it does make your whole moral outrage about your mattress a little less credible.”

“My outrage about my mattress wasn’t moral, it was practical. You know what, I’m starting to think you deliberately did not tell me about locking my door last night. I feel like the whole thing was a set-up from the very beginning.”

They had pulled up at the hospital, and were just sitting in the parking garage. Hal had just been talking to hear himself talk, really. In order not to think about what he was here to do. “It won’t take long,” he said. “You don’t have to wait, though. I can uber back.”

“I’ll be here,” Bruce said.

* * *

It took a bit longer than he had thought it would, getting fitted for the brace. He had thought it would just be like one of those things you picked up at the medical supply store, the kind you wore when you had a busted knee. But Leslie took a long time with measuring, and then she had him try out several different configurations, and then she had been dissatisfied with all of them, and in the end she had written some custom specifications and demanded that the orthopedics department fulfill her request immediately, and when you were Leslie Thompkins you could probably make all that happen in an hour and a half on a Saturday afternoon. 

“How’s that?” she said, as he walked tentatively across the room, testing out her final creation. 

“It feels. . . great, actually,” he said. He hadn’t realized how much energy he was expending just staying upright, until all of a sudden he didn’t have to work as hard. It was soft material, but with metal ribs all the way up on both sides, and it was slim enough to fit under his clothes. You could tell he was wearing it at the ankle, of course. And there was a hitch in his gait now, no doubt about it. But the pain was gone. 

“You could do a cane, too, if that makes it easier,” she said. 

“Yeah,” he said. “I think I’ll stick with this for now. Unless orthopedics has a Lucius Malfoy pimp cane I could use. But that’s probably not covered by my insurance, huh.” He studied himself in the mirror on the back of her office door. He wondered what would have happened last night if Scarlett Johansson had felt the brace on his leg. Would she have stopped? Would she have asked about it? What was the sexual etiquette, for future reference? 

He took his time heading back to the car, and stopped off at the hospital snack bar for some junk food. He also bought a banana, for good measure. Sure enough, Bruce was still sitting in the car, right where he had left him. Hal got in, and they sat there.

“Leslie says hi,” Hal said. Bruce said nothing, and Hal handed him a twinkie. “Vanilla,” he said. “Please eat it. I also got a banana, if you want that.”

Bruce unpeeled the twinkie like it was an ore sample from an alien planet, likely to combust at any moment. “So the brace fitting went well,” Hal said. “Which you can probably see.”

“Yes.”

“It was just time. It will probably help a lot. And there’s no reason to think there will be any further deterioration, Leslie said. At least right now. That’s how Marchand’s goes, there will be this big initial deterioration of muscle function, and then it will just stay like that for years, probably. It could be that it never gets worse, or at least not for a long time. It’s not as though it’s any big deal really, and plenty of people—” But then his throat clenched shut, and he sat there, staring out the window at the blank concrete of the parking garage. Something iron clawed at his throat, at his chest. “It’s not a big deal,” he managed.

Something stronger and warmer than iron gripped his hand. It was Bruce’s hand, gripping his. Hal kept looking out the window, but his fingers tightened on that hand like it was a lifeline. Bruce was gripping him so hard. It should have hurt, but it felt good. 

“Once when I was six,” Bruce said, “my father took me on rounds with him, at this hospital. I spent the day following him around. It was a lot, for a six year old. I think he expected me to be more interested in medicine than I was. He was impatient that I curled up in a corner with a book instead of listening to him work with a patient.” 

Hal stayed quiet. He didn’t have to feel anything right now. He could feel everything later. In this car there was only Bruce’s firm hand, and Bruce’s voice. 

“I never remember him speaking angrily to me. That wasn’t his way. Anyway,” Bruce continued, “I have lots of memories of my father, but this one is the most intense. I was playing out in the gardens one afternoon with Alfred – this was when Alfred spent a lot of his days outdoors, working in the garden, before he was head butler. And I would always tag along after. Alfred and I had this game, or I guess I did. From the time I was little, he had always called me Master Bruce, and the minute I could talk, I always called him Master Alfred. My mother thought it was adorable. But I wasn’t trying to be cute, it just made sense to me. It was what I had always called him.”

Hal tried to imagine little Bruce. When he imagined him, it was always like something out of a 19th-century painting – a dark-haired stern-eyed little boy in linen short pants, lordly hand resting on a piece of statuary or some shit like that. And yet he knew that he and Bruce were just five years apart. Maybe it was the Manor, and the fact that it was always 1892 somewhere in that house. 

“So one afternoon, my father comes out to see what we’re doing. And he hears me chattering away about school or something like that, Master Alfred this and Master Alfred that. And he tells me to stop.” Bruce squinted out the car window at nothing. “At first I couldn’t figure out what he meant. Stop talking? And he says, stop calling him Master Alfred. Why, I said. He said, because Alfred is a servant, and you are a young man now. He explained to me what it meant that Alfred was our servant, and that I must never forget the difference between family and servants. All this while Alfred is standing right there, mind you.”

“Christ,” Hal said.

“But Alfred stood there and took it, because that’s what you do when your employer has decided to make himself feel like a man by humiliating you in front of a six-year-old boy. You are a servant in this house, my father said to him. Do not forget your place. And Alfred looked him in the eyes and said, yes sir.” 

Hal wondered if it was weird that he hadn’t released Bruce’s hand. Bruce didn’t act like it was weird. Then again, Bruce owned a dinosaur. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever hated anyone more than I hated my father in that moment. He was jealous of Alfred, of course, and he let it drive him to pettiness. But those are not things that a six year old sees, of course. My father wanted me to see the difference between himself and Alfred. And I certainly did.”

Bruce released his hand. He reached for the twinkie and took a tentative bite. “Dear God,” he said with a grimace, setting it aside. “I don’t know how you put that in your mouth. Muscular dystrophy is the least of your problems when you’re inviting stomach cancer by ingesting this.”

“The least of my problems? Really?”

“Nobody likes a whiner, Jordan.” 

Hal laughed out loud, a short bark of a laugh, and it eased something in his middle. He plucked up Bruce’s discarded twinkie. “What the shit even is my life,” he sighed, “when you’re my best friend.”

“I’ve been wondering the same thing.”

Hal chewed his Twinkie meditatively. Maybe he just needed to eat more trash. Maybe it wasn’t the Marchand’s that was causing him to lose muscle mass, but all that healthy food Alfred had been shoveling into him. He needed to keep a stash of Ho-Hos on hand, somewhere in his kitchen cabinets. One of the boys would just find them, though. He had come home the other day to find both Dick and Tim ensconced in his living room playing Halo and stuffing their fat asses with the last of his coffee almond crunch ice cream, the little shits. 

“So in theory,” Hal said, thoughtfully, “you have ScarJo’s phone number.”

“In theory.”

“No wait. I told her I knew you, so now she should make the first move and ask you for my number, right? I should play hard to get.”

“You’re not that hard to get, though.”

“This is not the day for harsh truth.” He brushed his hands off. “Oh hey, Damian wants me to take him into space.”

“Does he, now.”

“I told him that was going to be a check with your dad kind of thing. If you said yes, my thought was I could just take him on a quick Earth orbit, nothing fancy. But I know he’s doing astronomy this semester, so maybe he might get a kick out of getting a little closer to the sun, if he gets up there and feels comfortable.”

“You know he’s doing astronomy now?”

“Well. . . yeah, we’ve talked about it a little. He’s asked me some questions about things. Anyway, my thought about taking him up was that he’s such a visual learner, you know? The way he’s always sketching things, the way he understands thing by drawing them. And maybe that’s the problem with him and science, you know, is that he doesn’t have a visual frame of reference. But if astronomy were something he could draw, and not just numbers on a page, then that might really make the difference for him, I was thinking.”

Bruce was giving him a very weird look. Too late it occurred to Hal he might really be overstepping here – that maybe Bruce wouldn’t appreciate someone telling him things about his kid. Every time he mentioned the drawing to Damian, “don’t tell Father” was always the first thing he said. So maybe it was a sore subject. 

“I see,” was all Bruce said. 

“You’re worried about the safety thing.”

“It had crossed my mind.”

“He would be completely safe, the whole time – I promise no risk-taking. No trips to the ice-rings or anything like that, I swear. The ring would be protecting him every second.”

“And if you lost consciousness?”

“That’s not going to happen. But if you’d feel better about it, I can get John or another Lantern to go with me. Give him an extra layer of protection, if anything should happen. Hell, I bet I can make a few calls, get him a brigade of Lanterns to come be his escort.”

Bruce gave a thin smile. “Not the point, for Damian. More Lanterns would make this less fun for him. No, take him on your own, it’s fine. But be prepared, because if you’re handing out rides, the line is going to form behind Damian. Dick is going to want to go, and Tim as well.”

And as always when he was talking about his sons, there was an omitted name. Hal usually ignored it, but today didn’t feel like that kind of day. “I talked to Jason this week,” he said, and Bruce fell silent. 

“Yeah,” Hal continued. “It was Halloween night. He followed us, actually. Waited until Damian ran off to trick or treat and then appeared out of nowhere. Wonder where he gets that from.”

Bruce snorted. “Anyway,” Hal continued, “he was kind of sweet. Wanted to know if he should trail Damian for me. I mean, what do I know, last time I talked to the kid he was seventeen, but he seemed nice enough. Was very into giving me advice about living at the Manor, that kind of thing.”

Bruce nodded curtly. “So maybe you should give him a call sometime,” Hal said. “You know, he’s clearly out there, circling your perimeter. Maybe if you just reached out—”

“I appreciate the impromptu family therapy, but because you helped a twelve-year-old with his science homework, does not mean you are suddenly qualified to comment on my relationship with Jason,” Bruce said, and bang, he could hear the slammed doors in Bruce’s voice, _wham wham wham,_ just like that.

“Eat an entire bag of dicks, Bruce. And maybe so, whatever, maybe you’re right about me and my qualifications. But you know what else is right? From the very first, I noticed the way your boys talk about you. It’s the way they say your name, the way they look at you. They love you like fuck. They would fucking kill for you, all of them. And Jason says your name the very same way, so say whatever you want, but that boy loves you. And I know you love him, so fine, piss all over me for saying something about it, but that’s the truth.”

They sat in silence, and Hal ran the mental tally of the barricades he had just knocked down. Probably Bruce would ask him to move out. Probably he had just destroyed the best thing in his life. Whatever, who the fuck cared.

“Jason doesn’t require any incentive to kill,” Bruce said, in a different voice. 

“I kill,” Hal said. “You kill, when you have to. Lanterns are not exactly a non-violent police force. I’ve killed, a lot. I’ve killed on planets – like the one we’re sitting on right now – that don’t acknowledge the Corps as a legitimate police force, so that means I ought to be rotting in a jail cell right now. By your code, anyway.”

“That’s a false equivalency and you know it,” Bruce said, his voice low and fierce. “And not that it’s any of your business, but I ‘reach out’ as you so eloquently put it at least once a week. I call Jason regularly, and I leave messages I know he deletes, except for the times when he doesn’t delete them and actually answers, and then he just sits there in silence. But I keep doing it, week after week, until I finally fulfill whatever penance he decides is adequate, until I have finally bled out enough for him, until he has finally had enough, because let me tell you something that you probably don’t know, you hypocritical over-grown man-child who has never had a relationship he didn’t torpedo within six weeks, much less an actual child whose life he was responsible for, apart from your occasional rentals of mine that is. I keep doing it because I have no choice. Because that is what you do, when you are a father. Because whatever you think you know about relationships is for shit, Jordan, because what I have with my son is not a relationship, it is my life, and that you could even imagine that the issue is I don’t want to talk to him just reveals how little you understand of me, or Jason, or anything that doesn’t have to do with your next video game or six-pack of Twinkies.”

The car was silent. “Okay,” Hal said, after a few minutes. “First off, Twinkies don’t even come in six-packs, Prince Harry.”

Bruce turned to look at him, a slow incredulous gaze. “No, because it’s . . .they come in twos,” Hal said. “So it just made your whole big wind-up kind of anti-climactic, ‘cause that was all I could think about at the end there, was how here I am sitting in a car with a person who literally thinks Twinkies are sold in six-packs like beer. I understand I was supposed to be all emotionally devastated at the end by your sick burn, but it just didn’t work for me, on account of the Twinkies. Oh and also? Because excuse me while I puke myself laughing at being taught lessons in real life from you of all people, a man who last did his own grocery shopping in that’s right, absolutely fucking never. Except for the lemon curd, let’s not forget about that.”

He balled up the Twinkies wrapper and stuffed it in the bag of the other junk food he had bought at the snack bar. “Pretty damn hilarious, when you think about it, that they sell this shit in a hospital,” Hal said. 

Bruce had gone back to staring out the window. They were still sitting in this concrete bunker of a parking garage, where apparently they were going to be sitting all afternoon. It was partly his own damn fault, because he had known Jason was a no-go zone, and he had gone there. He couldn’t help it, where Bruce was concerned. Never had been able to. Bruce’s spectacular over-reaction, though, that was on him. But for fucking real – a six-pack of Twinkies. Jesus H. 

Bruce just continued to sit there. Suddenly Hal thought of Marty, his youngest nephew. When he got mad, he would sit just as still as that. Marty would lock his knees to his chest. Like he had fallen so deep down some well of emotion, he didn’t know how to crawl out. You would have to spend hours cajoling him gently out of whatever prison he had locked himself inside. At six fucking years old. No, seven now. Fuck Jim forever.

“Come on,” Hal said. “Let’s get out of here. You wanna keep at this, fine by me, I’m happy to hand you your ass all day long. But maybe let’s do it somewhere I can stretch out, because my back’s hurting like a son of a bitch.”

“Your back,” Bruce said. “I thought it was getting better.”

“Yeah, me too. It’s just—last couple of weeks have not been great.”

“Did you talk to Leslie about it?”

“No.”

“Because?”

“Because one thing at a time, all right? And because she would have wanted another EMG, and fuck that, I just want to go home and sleep. Speaking of which I haven’t thanked you for your room in the cave last night. It was weird and awesome and I woke up feeling exactly like Jean-Luc Picard.”

A flicker of a frown on Bruce’s face. “Who?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake. Pop culture really is something that happened to other people for you, isn’t it? Star Trek is fifty years old for fuck’s sake, you would think this is something you could learn about. Okay that’s it, we are netflixing tonight. No argument.”

“I wasn’t going to argue. And just because I didn’t immediately catch the reference doesn’t mean I am somehow deficient in—”

“That’s called arguing. Oh my God, can you just drive? Can the car just go into gear and move, is that a thing that can happen? Because I have not taken meds today and would very, very much like to. Thank you.”

“Glove compartment,” Bruce said, shifting the car into gear and gliding noiselessly out of the parking space. That was the thing about this car, it made hardly any noise. It skated on the asphalt like it was ice. He used to like his little Honda, until he rode regularly in a Lotus.

“What about the glove compartment?”

“There are some of your meds in there.”

“Ah, how, exactly?”

“I asked Leslie for some. This is not the first time you’ve been caught short, so I thought I would keep some on hand.”

“That’s creepy.”

“It’s meant to be helpful. Could you please shut up and take the meds.”

“You just want me to take them so I fall asleep.”

“A little bit, yes.”

Hal sighed and shook out two from the bottle. “Fine,” he sighed. “But only as a favor to you.”

He didn’t fall asleep though, even if Bruce probably thought he did. He turned over and closed his eyes and let the motion of the car lull him. His stomach was churning with Twinkies and narcotics, which was possibly not the best diet choice he had made in recent memory. “Fuck, I missed Alfred’s breakfast,” he murmured. “It’s Saturday.”

“You didn’t. The morning after a party Alfred is generally too busy shouting on the phone at catering companies to cook anything. It can take a couple of days for them to remove their tents, and then inevitably they’ve damaged the lawn with clumsy removal, and Alfred has to shout at them some more.”

“I can’t really imagine Alfred shouting.”

“By shouting I of course mean he enunciates very clearly.”

“Fucking terrifying.”

“When he wants to be, yes.” 

He must have actually fallen asleep at some point, though, because the next thing he knew they were pulling up in front of the Manor. The car slipped into park with the same noiseless silky motion. He woke up because there was a hand on him, doing that thing that Bruce did where he didn’t shake you awake, but just let his hand rest on your shoulder until you swam to consciousness. He wondered if that was another thing he had learned from Alfred.

“We’re home,” Bruce said.


	8. Chapter 8

“Hey Alfred,” Hal said, sticking his head in the breakfast room.

“No I most certainly shall not hold,” Alfred said into the phone. “The contract specifically states that removal shall take place within twenty-four hours, and here we are at hour thirty-six, and—oh bugger,” Alfred sighed. He held the phone away from his face, and Hal could hear the tinny hold music blaring at him. He peered over his glasses at Hal. “What may I do for you, Master Harold?”

Alfred was sitting at the table, surrounded by what looked like piles of bills and accounting statements, his salt-and-pepper hair unusually disheveled, a displeased look about his mouth. “Ah. . . never mind, I’ll catch you later,” Hal said.

“You’ve caught me now, what is it?”

“I was just gonna – I just noticed that yesterday, when I came back from the hospital, you had cleaned my apartment. And changed my sheets.”

“Of course I had. Master Bruce told me about the unfortunate incident. My apologies about that, sir.”

“He told you to clean my place?”

Alfred’s frown deepened. “He and I consulted about it briefly, yes. I had some of the staff that came in to clean up after the party take care of it. Was something unsatisfactory in their work?”

“No, it’s just—ah, thank you. And. . .”

“And?”

“You don’t need to do that, is all.”

Alfred set the phone down. “I see,” he said.

“I’m not helpless,” Hal said. “I can look after my own things. I’m not one more person for you to manage.”

Alfred’s gaze was level. “Of course sir,” he said. Hal felt like he had wrongfooted it, but he wasn’t sure how. He had said something wrong. 

“I’m just not used to that kind of thing,” he tried. “That’s all. You know, with people doing that kind of thing for me.”

“Of course, sir,” Alfred said again. “It won’t happen again.” And Alfred went back to his paperwork, and picked up the phone for more calls. 

Hal was still thinking about it over Star Trek that night. To his great surprise, Bruce had actually liked what he had shown him so far – or at least, he had sat on Hal’s sofa staring in frowning concentration at the screen, which was maybe Bruce’s definition of a good time. “You like?” Hal had said, after the first night. 

“Very strange,” Bruce had said. “The astrophysics of this are boggling. Space does not work like that.”

“Please tell me you are not about to mansplain space to me.”

“I would think that you of all people—”

“Okay, that’s it, we’re watching episode two. I don’t think you have fully appreciated how tight Troi’s uniform is. That uniform rewrote my entire sexuality, when I was a kid. Maybe we should rewind.”

Bruce even joined him for round two the next night. A bit late – it was close to midnight – because Bruce had no real conception of time of day, but that was okay. Bruce appeared to be in something of a lull right now. There was no more talk of his investigation in Indonesia, and as far as Hal knew he hadn’t been on patrol in a while. If he went to the office, Hal was unaware of it. No one in the house really ran on a normal schedule, Hal had long since figured out. Bruce would enter these long fallow periods of doing basically nothing, and then he would work three solid weeks on four hours’ sleep. Nobody except Alfred kept to any sort of schedule that he could figure out, which was a little disorienting. 

“I like that one,” Bruce said, nodding at the screen.

“Who, the emotionless automaton? Figures. That’s Data. You want some kettle corn?”

“No, I ate.”

“I doubt that,” Hal muttered. He got up to get the popcorn out of the microwave, and returned with a bowl. “So I think I seriously pissed off Alfred today,” he said, re-settling with a pillow behind his back. The sofa was actually murder on his back, but he didn’t feel like letting on. 

“No you didn’t,” Bruce replied. “Alfred adores you, for some unknown reason. I’ve told him several times that you’re not the Flash, but he still doesn’t believe me.”

“No I really did. He called me sir and everything.”

“Alfred calls everyone sir. Unless you asked him not to do something, you’re fine.” 

"I asked him not to clean my apartment.”

Bruce’s head snapped to his. “You what?”

Hal winced. “I know! I know, but I don’t know why that’s such a big deal. Yesterday, he had the maids or whoever come in and clean the whole place and change my sheets, because of the party. I just told him that I didn’t need him to do that, I could look after myself just fine.”

Bruce was still just staring at him. “I’m a grown-ass man!” Hal protested. “And I’m not some disabled—some object of pity that he needs to look after, all right. I’m not in a fucking nursing home yet.”

Bruce closed his eyes and rubbed at his forehead. “Jordan,” he said. “You can’t do that. Alfred does what he wants to do, and trying to persuade him out of that is not going to work. Trust me on this, I have forty-seven years of experience in Alfred, and you will always, always lose. He didn’t have your rooms cleaned because you’re disabled, he had them cleaned because it was a kind thing to do. You don’t get to say what Alfred does or does not do in his own house.”

Hal thought about that one. “Okay,” he said. “But technically it’s your house.”

“Well, that bourgeois upbringing really did a number on you, didn’t it? When the classist comes out in you it’s quite something. It might interest you to know that only fifty percent of this house is mine. The other fifty percent is legally Alfred’s.”

Hal frowned. “How’s that?”

“Because I sold it to him,” Bruce said. “About twenty years ago. The asking price was twenty-eight dollars and seven cents, for the twenty-eight years and seven months of service he had given this family – and given was what it was, because if you look at the salary that came to Alfred in most of those years you would be revolted. He stayed because of me, of course. A man with his skills could have made a spectacular career for himself, whenever he chose. When I came into control of my trust I amended his salary, of course, but later on I decided to do better than that. So I offered, and he accepted. He owns fifty percent of this entire property, and every stick of furniture in it. You didn’t think he was arguing with the caterers out of a sense of principle, did you? They damage those lawns, they damage his primary investment.”

“Jesus,” Hal said. “But you—tell him what to do and shit, and he—”

“When? When have you ever heard me tell Alfred what to do? He and I consult about running the property, but I generally leave final decisions to him, because his judgment is better than mine about the house. He’s lived in it longer.”

Hal thought about the little boy who had stood in the gardens and watched his father humiliate Alfred. And now Alfred strolled those grounds as their owner. Well. That was a nice fuck you to Thomas Wayne, buried up on the hillside behind the house. That little boy Alfred had raised was nothing if not fiercely loyal. 

“Huh,” Hal said. He thought about what Jason had said, about the way the family ran, and making the mistake of thinking it was all about Bruce. “Okay. See, this is the sort of stuff you ought to explain to people before they move in.”

“So if you had seen Alfred’s financials, you might have had a better understanding of his role in the family?”

“Now you’re just making me sound like an asshole on purpose. And by the way, before you shit all over middle America with that ‘bourgeois upbringing’ shit, pretty sure upper-class dickwads like your dad invented classism.”

“An excellent point.”

Hal got up and scrounged for a beer in his fridge. He handed one off to Bruce, who took it. They settled back into watching for a while. Hal tried to concentrate, but the spasming had started in his back, and worse than that, the bone-deep ache. He had really held out hope that the brace would help with that, by relieving some of the work his core was having to do. But it didn’t seem to be doing the trick. Or maybe the trick was, you had to wear it all the time, and he was definitely not doing that. Sometimes you just wanted to pad around your own apartment in bare feet and sweatpants. He discreetly shifted the pillow behind him to support him a little better.

“You know quite a bit about my family,” Bruce said.

“Yep. I figure another six months of this, I’m gonna have my PhD in Wayne-ology.”

“So I have only one question to ask you about yours.”

“Fair’s fair, go ahead.”

“Do you remember a time before your father began hitting you?”

Hal took a sip off his beer to cover the clench of his chest. He meant to answer, he truly did, but he discovered he wasn’t able to. It was just the baldness of the question. All of a sudden he was eleven years old again, and alone in a room with Martin Jordan’s wrath, and the blow to the side of his head this time knocked him into the wall. By eleven he knew better than to cry. By eleven he knew that telling mom wouldn’t help, because she already knew. His job was to take it. But then God and the universe had saved him, and his dad had died the next year. It was something he thought about sometimes: if that hadn’t happened, would his father eventually have killed him? And would his mother have finally sat in the other room, leafing through a magazine and sipping her gin and tonic, and let him do it? Or would she have gotten up, come into the room and said something? _Oh Martin, stop_ , she might say, in that faintly exasperated voice she used when her husband used a good dishtowel to wipe down a carburetor. 

And Jim had gone and named his youngest son after their father, because to Jim his dad was some kind of hero. _Let me tell you about your fucking hero_ , he had thought about saying, time and time again. And he hadn’t, because why destroy that for Jim? His job was to take it. 

“Nope,” he finally said, about fifteen minutes after Bruce had asked his question. Bruce nodded absently, as though they had been talking about the weather. Hal extended his beer.

“To shitty dads,” he said, and Bruce knocked his beer against Hal’s. 

“I got off easy, I think,” Bruce said. 

“Well, it’s not a contest, but you’re right, I win.”

Bruce gave a short laugh and drained off more of his beer. He set it down and turned to Hal. “Your back is killing you,” he said. “Stop trying to mask it. Come on, let’s get you over to the bed. We can watch from there.”

“All right, I give up,” Hal groaned, and he shuffled over to the bed and eased himself onto it. He turned up the volume, because this was a part with Troi, and he didn’t want to miss it. Bruce got onto the bed beside him, but Hal could tell he was mainly watching for signs of further discomfort. 

“Meds?” Bruce said quietly, after a bit, and Hal shook his head.

“Hit my max already,” he said. 

Bruce reached over and turned off the power on the remote. “Come on,” he said. “Let me work on it. If I don’t, you won’t get any sleep tonight.”

Hal hurt too much to protest. He rolled over, but groaned as his spine readjusted. “You don’t have to,” he said, but it was a half-hearted protest, and Bruce brushed it aside. 

“Shirt off,” he said, and Hal obediently tugged off his shirt and settled into the mattress. Bruce dug his broad warm hands into the aching muscles of Hal’s back.

So: it was funny how you could think one thing was the story of your life, but it was actually another. 

If anyone had asked him to tell the story of the last six months of his life, he would tell the story of the Marchand’s, and how that had slowly transformed his life, and what that had been like. Thing was, he thought that was the story of his life.

But it was like Jason said: the things you saw on the surface were not always the real things. Those weren’t the realest bits. All along, this much realer thing had been happening, and he was such a dumb-ass – so self-absorbed and full of self-pity, if the painful truth were told – that he hadn’t even seen it. This whole story he had been in, and he hadn’t known he was in the story until Bruce all of a sudden and for the first time had both hands on Hal’s naked flesh and Hal’s whole body said _oh God yes fuck please_ and just fucking melted. Just fucking melted. 

He made a small sound, but it probably just sounded like the noise someone having an expert back massage would make, and not the gasp of someone having the biggest fucking epiphany of their adult life.

Bruce’s deft hands moved up and down, careful not to dig too hard, knowing just where to apply pressure and just how hard to knead along the spine. 

It was like a movie in his head of the last few months: _click click click_ , scene after scene falling into place. Like a movie, but seeing everything in a rush, all together. And the thing of it was, when he no longer saw himself as the star of the show, when it was no longer just about him, he could actually see the whole thing for what it was. He could see that he had been falling in love from day one, from fucking day one. But he hadn’t seen it. Because Hal Jordan didn’t fall in love with guys, right? Hal Jordan fucked guys when he felt like it, but it didn’t have anything to do with his _actual_ life. 

“That all right?” Bruce asked, and Hal tried to make a sound that wasn’t a needy groan. 

“Y-yeah,” he whispered. “Feels. . . great.”

“Tell me if I need to go deeper.”

Hal dug his fingers into the mattress and swallowed. “Right,” he managed. 

So his body had known for months what his brain had not. His body had been there, but it had not bothered to communicate with his brain – or more probably, his brain had shut out the information. 

“Is this all right?” Bruce said. He had maneuvered himself so he was on top of Hal, more or less straddling him.

“Fine,” Hal said, his voice a thread of itself. “Sure.”

And now Bruce’s thighs were bracketing his, and he could feel the slight pressure of Bruce’s body on the back of his thighs, and his cock jumped at it. A low steady thrum set in, the old familiar one, only not familiar, because everything felt new, but dear God. Dear fucking God. Hal felt his breathing accelerate. 

There was the barest hitch in the motion of Bruce’s hands. “I’m not hurting you?”

“No,” Hal said. “It’s—it’s good.”

“When do you go back to PT?”

“Ah. . . Tuesday, I think.”

“Because I think your back is going to require some serious work.”

“Okay.”

“You sure you’re all right?”

“Y-yes.” 

Bruce was really working hard on his shoulders now, and he was paying less attention to his weight, which meant he was now more or less sitting on Hal’s ass. Hal was full hard now. It was taking every ounce of his willpower not to grind down into the mattress. But as Bruce’s hands moved up and down, and up and down, Bruce’s weight would shift just enough to press Hal that little bit more into the mattress, to increase the pressure on his cock just enough. 

He had to breathe through his mouth to steady himself. Sweet Christ. It would be so easy to reach around and grab Bruce, to bring Bruce’s mouth down to his, to taste him, wrap his arms around him, bury himself in him. But Bruce – what would Bruce do? This was the part he hadn’t even thought about. He had been too exultant to finally realize what movie he was in, and too late it occurred to him that Bruce might not be in the same movie he was. Like, at all. 

“What about some of those pain patches?” Bruce was saying. “You could put some along your spine here, and it might help.”

“No,” Hal said quickly. The patches were so cold, and right now all he wanted to feel was the warmth of Bruce’s hands.

“All right.” Bruce sat back, and now all his weight was on Hal’s ass. Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Everything in him wanted to arch up, to press back against that delicious weight. His cock had never been this hard. 

“Well,” Bruce said, and now he was shifting. He was lifting off of Hal. _No no no where are you going, come back, come back_. “I think a lot of the problem is in your lower back. May I work on that?”

“Sure,” Hal said, proud of how normal his voice sounded. And then he did groan aloud, because Bruce’s hands dug right back in, and they were moving lower, and when Bruce said lower back he really meant lower back, and _fuck fuck fuck_. Bruce was kneading right along his hipbones, and then his thumbs were dipping below the waist of Hal’s sweatpants with every sweeping motion. 

So, Hal had been wrong before, about his cock being harder than it had ever been. He was waaaaay harder now. 

As Bruce’s thumbs pressed him down into the mattress, and pressed again, and again, and again, Hal faced the serious possibility that he might actually come. Like, not a distant surreal imagining – a “this could actually happen” kind of thing. Because Bruce was not letting up. He was not stopping. 

“Is this helping at all?” Bruce asked. 

He would have given anything to believe that Bruce was just trolling him, but that was not the sort of thing that Bruce did. “It’s great,” Hal said weakly. 

Bruce stopped, and placed a hand on the center of Hal’s spine, gently. “You sound like I’m hurting you,” he said. 

“That’s. . . not exactly the word for it,” was out Hal’s mouth before he could stop it.

Shit. Maybe he wouldn’t think that Hal meant what he meant. Probably it was the furthest thing from Bruce’s mind. But Bruce’s hand lifted off him. “Then I’ll keep working,” he said. Was Hal. . . imagining that his voice sounded different somehow? Maybe he did know what Hal meant, and he was just ignoring it.

The hands were back on his lower back. The thumbs were still sweeping inside his waistband. But then his hands lifted, and shifted, and then – holy fuck, Bruce’s hands were on his ass. Over the cloth of his sweatpants, but still. Holy fuck. Bruce’s grip was firm and deliberate, as he kneaded Hal’s ass. 

Hal bit his lip to the blood. He dug his fingers harder into the mattress. And then Bruce shifted again, and moved to the back of Hal’s thighs. His hands swept down Hal’s legs, and back up to the top of his thighs, and his whole hand was gripping the top of Hal’s thighs, encircling them, and he was a bare inch from brushing a thumb against Hal’s balls on the upsweep. Hal shut his eyes and let himself shake with it. He was beyond pretense, beyond caring. He was going to cum, he knew that now. The steady unstoppable motion of Bruce’s hands made it inevitable. It was just a matter of how long he could hold out. 

And then Bruce’s mouth was at his ear. “If you turn over, I can work on your quads,” Bruce said quietly.

“No,” Hal said. “I can’t.” He could do a lot of things in this world, but turn over right now was just not among them. 

There was a pause, a beat, a breath of air. “Yes you can,” Bruce said, and his voice was so quiet, his mouth so close, so close. 

He was breathing so fast right now he could almost not get air. He had to get air or die, he had to crush Bruce to him or die. So that was what he did – he rolled over, and in the same motion he gripped Bruce and rolled him too, so he was on top now, pressing Bruce underneath him. Bruce offered no resistance. Hal stopped. His whole body was pressed against Bruce’s, and he could feel every part of him now, not just his hands. He could feel neurons firing up and down his body that he didn’t know he possessed. And Bruce – holy fuck, Bruce’s pupils were blown. 

“Yeah?” Hal said, and Bruce said, “Yeah,” and Hal sealed his mouth to Bruce’s. 

Bruce arched up to meet his mouth. Their kiss was hungry and shaky and Hal was practically biting at his mouth, he was trying to taste so much of it. His fingers were on Bruce’s face, in Bruce’s hair. Bruce kept leaning up to reach him with his mouth, and it was that – that hungry little lean, that right there, that told him he was not alone in this, and that Bruce wanted him as much as he wanted Bruce. 

“God, baby,” Hal moaned, and kissed him harder, wanting only to touch every inch of him, only why couldn’t he, why couldn’t he get any more skin? Because right, clothes. 

He lifted up long enough to tug Bruce’s shirt off. Bruce was wearing jeans, which was going to be a little more complicated. They were back to kissing now, chest to chest, skin to skin, but then Bruce had stopped him with a hand on his face. Hal kissed at the hand, the fingers. 

“Hey,” Bruce whispered. “Don’t push it, if you’re hurting. Not everything has to happen tonight.”

“I’m good,” he said. “Look, there is such a thing as physical inevitability here, and I’m gonna cum one way or the other, so you’re welcome to leave the room for that or you’re welcome to stay, but I promise you I am not hurting, babe.”

Bruce’s mouth quirked up. “Then I think I’ll go with stay,” he said, and he rolled them so he was on top of Hal now, his mouth pressed back to Hal’s. God, the kissing, how had he not known or guessed what kind of kisser Bruce would be, egregious oversight on his part, really fucking ridiculous of him not to have known that. Bruce pressed hard into him, pressed his cock up against Hal’s, and Hal groaned aloud.

“Yeah?” Bruce whispered, and “Yeah,” Hal whispered back. Bruce set up a slow grind. Hal dug fingers into his shoulders. 

“Clothes off,” he panted. “Fuck, please.”

Bruce moved like lightning – his jeans had been kicked off to the floor, boxers tossed after them. He knew well enough what Bruce looked like naked, knew what everyone in the League looked like naked. But that was different from seeing Bruce hard, and fuck, oh fuck. Look at that, he was literally having a saliva response to Bruce’s cock. Bruce was poised above him, clearly waiting for something.

“Pants?” Bruce said. 

“Oh! Right, sorry,” he said, and kicked off his sweatpants, which were a pre-cummy mess anyway. But Bruce was doing the same avid hungry thing he had done, looking him over, and then they were kissing again, and Bruce was pressing down again, and they were grinding cock to cock now. 

Hal gripped him and rolled them again, and Bruce saved them from peril by quickly shooting out an arm to brace them from rolling off the bed. He could get much better friction this way, and he groaned aloud at it. His fingers were probably digging in to the point of pain. 

“Jesus, Bruce,” he gasped. Bruce got fingers in Hal’s hair – that was why he hadn’t had it cut, of course, it all made sense now, he was a genius – and pulled Hal’s mouth back to his and just fucking ate his mouth while Hal was grinding on him. 

“Do you want my hand,” Bruce murmured, sliding his mouth to Hal’s ear.

“No, I—fuck,” he moaned weakly. He was so close, so close, but he didn’t want to cum before Bruce. 

“Better idea.” Bruce hooked a leg in his and rolled them so they were on their side. He got a hand around both their cocks, and Hal shuddered at the brush of Bruce’s fingers against him, at Bruce’s hand that went exploring, that rubbed against his balls.

“Don’t really need lube, do you,” Bruce murmured. 

“Not—tonight. God that feels good.”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck I—I’m close.”

“Yeah?” Bruce’s hand was deft and rough and perfect, and his other hand—that hand was on his ass, pulling him in, kneading him. “God, your ass,” Bruce growled, and his hand sped up. Hal arched into it, let his head fall back.

“Can’t—can’t stop,” he gasped, and his cock felt so good sliding against Bruce’s, there wasn’t even a word for what it felt like to fuck against Bruce’s slick steel of a cock. He came in a delicious wave, only Bruce was the one groaning at it, Bruce’s hand was frantic now. Bruce more or less threw himself on top of Hal, grinding while he rubbed them both, and he felt Bruce’s orgasm in his whole body, the shudder of it in all his muscles.

Bruce made a small strangled sound, and Hal wrapped his hand around Bruce’s hand that was still around their cocks. They were a wet sticky cummy mess. Bruce’s fingers wrung a final spurt from him, and he shook with it, it felt so fucking fucking good. He was nuzzling at Bruce’s neck, just breathing him in. 

The moment when Bruce collapsed on him felt even better than the fucking, somehow. It was like he could feel all the breath leave Bruce’s body, as he lay there sprawled half-on, half-off Hal. “Alfred better come change these sheets again,” Hal murmured in his ear, and he felt the sweetness of Bruce’s laugh.

He wiped his hand on the sheets, wiping Bruce’s for him too, and what he could reach of their cocks, because Bruce was clearly not moving anytime this week. “Did I break you?” Hal whispered.

“Little bit,” came the muffled answer. 

Hal shifted them, careful not to disentangle them as he moved. Bruce’s head was more or less cradled on his shoulder. “Stay the night?”

Bruce’s eyes flicked open, shockingly blue. “If that’s what you want.”

“Yeah. That’s what I want.”

They watched each other for a while, exploring more gently this time, less frantically. There was a particular soft bit of skin at the bottom of Bruce’s ribs that needed investigation. He had thought there might be a lot to say, but as it turned out, there wasn’t. Bruce’s thumb grazing against the stubble below his jaw said things, and Hal’s fingers stroking the base of his spine answered him back. 

“I’m heading back to Singapore in the morning,” Bruce said.

“Okay,” Hal said. “Is Bruce going, or is Batman?”

“Both. Will you keep an eye on Damian?”

“What, you mean the rental?”

Bruce’s eyes shut briefly. “Forgive me,” he said, and Hal bent forward, let his lips brush against those lovely eyes. 

“Actually,” Hal said, “I was wondering if having a Lantern around on your trip might be useful.”

Bruce was fully alert now. “You mean that?”

“Yeah.”

“Because yes, it would. Think you can follow my orders?”

Hal gave a long, low belly laugh at that. “Oh this is gonna be fun plus one. You’re shitting me, right?”

Bruce arched a brow. “Well it was worth a try.”

Hal laughed again. “This is your investigation, I get that. But if I see something that warrants involving the Corps, I will make that call.”

“I am aware of the risks of involving a Lantern in this, believe me.” Bruce’s hand had begun a long slow stroke of Hal’s side, down then up then down again. “You sure you feel up to it?” he said, in a softer voice.

“Yeah. I mean. . . with conditions.”

“Such as?”

“Such as regular massages. Especially ones that end like this.”

Bruce’s smile did things to Hal’s insides. “You want to trade sexual favors for investigative work.”

“Hell yeah. Quid pro quo, Clarice.” He looked at Bruce’s slightly blank expression. “You don’t. . . oh my God. You don’t get that reference at all, do you. Okay, first thing we get back, we have got to be a lot less chill and a lot more Netflix.”

“All right.” Bruce’s thumb was still brushing along his jaw. Bruce had a thing for face-touching, evidently. Not that he was complaining. “If I stay, will that keep you from resting?”

“I mean. . . if you’re asking am I likely to notice that six-plus feet of hotness in a body I want to lick every inch of is lying next to me, then yeah, probably.”

“Do you now.” Bruce was edging a bit closer, and Hal pulled him in, and they were kissing again, and this, oh fuck, this was a thousand times sweeter and better than before, even – lying here necking in the gentle wash of hormones and orgasm and bliss, and oh man, he was so fucked. So fucked. 

Bruce’s thumbs were back on his face, brushing at his cheekbones now, bracketing his face while kissing it. “Sleep now,” he murmured, but Hal kissed him some more, and Bruce sank into it, let Hal’s arms wrap around him. 

Hal started to drift off like that, letting sleep wash over him. Bruce’s long body was almost enough to heat him all the way through, but not quite enough, and Bruce must have known that, because right as they were falling asleep he reached down and pulled up the soft quilt Hal kept at the foot of the bed. Hal’s muscles needed warmth to keep from knotting up, and Bruce knew it. 

Oh yeah. Infinitely fucked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end of Part One. The first chapter of Part Two will be posted one week from today, on 11-5-18, and I think you know I'm good for it.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part Two begins.

“Headed your way,” Bruce’s voice said into his comm.

“I see him.” Hal was floating in a narrow canyon between two skyscrapers, far enough to be out of line of sight. Their target was moving northwest, straight toward Hal.

“Kill that glow,” Bruce said.

“For the last time,” Hal muttered, “this is not something I have control over.”

“Switch it off, dammit. You’re getting reflection from the building on your five.”

Hal swore and slowly descended. He meant to turn off his ring when he was on the ground, maybe lie in wait for their target and then glow up when target was in range, but he hadn’t judged the time right, and the target had spotted the movement of his descent. He turned and ran.

“Nope, ‘fraid not,” Hal said, and a quick green arm shot out into Tan Quee Lan Street and yanked him back into the alley. 

“Lantern, _NO!_ ” Bruce was shouting into his comm, but that quick flash of green had apparently been all that was necessary to draw the attention of their target’s back-up, which was, oh joy, a helicopter gunship. Which was currently opening fire up and down the avenue, and there were civilian cars dodging and weaving the strafing gunfire, and watch, Batman was going to make this all _his_ fault.

“Okay, now you’re just pissing me off,” Hal said, and he shot into the air, first securing their suspect with thick green ropes. He wrapped green tentacles around the chopper, which was still firing wildly, and he used a hammer to snap off its gunports. He made straight for the docks and their safehouse at Pasir Panjang terminal – they could probably stow these guys in a cargo container if nothing else. He was a little unsure what to do with a whole helicopter, so after he shook out the bad guys he tossed it into the harbor. He used the same green ropes to tie them up as he had the first guy, but he put a bright green bow on each of their heads. He was just floating gently to the ground when Batman screeched up on his cycle. Flying was cool, but there was no reason he couldn’t have had a motorcycle too. Batman was just being stingy. 

“Lantern,” he snarled.

“Okay okay, I know what you’re gonna say, that was maybe a little sloppier on the execution than I would have hoped for, but look, at the end of the day—”

“At the end of the day the forensic evidence I needed was on that helicopter, which you just threw into the Straits of Johor.”

“Oh,” Hal said. “So you. . . probably want me to go get that, huh.”

The cowl was masking most of his face, but it wasn’t hard to work out his facial expression. “Right,” Hal said. “I’ll get on that. You just stay with these guys, and I’ll—”

The distant whine of police sirens bearing down on their location froze them both. 

“No time,” Bruce said. 

“I’ll head them off,” Hal said, shooting into the sky. A few quick roadblock constructs would give Bruce enough time to store their witnesses, but those weren’t exactly unobtrusive, and the police vehicles were fanning out at the obstructions, pointing up at him, shouting. 

“Hey,” Hal called. “How you doing. I’m actually on your side, I just kind of need you guys to stay put for a second, no big, I swear.”

The shouting officers seemed very unconvinced. Hal dissolved the constructs and shot straight up into the air, leading them away from the docks. Sure enough, the pursuit was chasing him now, which just showed a sad lack of trust but then again, civilian police forces were not his favorite allies. How Bruce managed a working relationship with the Gotham PD he had no idea.

“Secured,” Bruce said into his comm. “Get back to base and—”

His transmission was broken up by static, or it could have been interference from the large sea monster of undoubted alien origin that burst out of the harbor with a bloodthirsty roar. “Okay,” Hal said. “So when you said ‘arms cartel’ I’m thinking you could have been a little more specific and actually included the part about how they apparently _have a fucking kaiju _, possibly?”__

So that was the story of how a forty-five minute drop job became a four-hour fight with helicopter gunships, the Singapore police, and literal sea monsters – a fight they ended up winning, by the way, but trust Batman to find the negative and drive right for it. 

“Every single objective of this investigation, destroyed,” he growled. They were sitting in the cargo hold of the vast empty ship Bruce had commandeered – rusted and abandoned from the outside, but a gleaming replica of the Batcave deep belowdecks. Bruce had ripped his cowl off and was scowling at Hal. 

“Well, not every single one,” Hal pointed out. “We did manage to survive the night, so there’s that.” 

“Your death is not actually a dealbreaker for me, right now. The point of this investigation was to gather evidence and follow its trail. Is that just completely alien to anything the Corps does? Is grabbing people and shoving them in a box truly the extent of your policing abilities?”

“Oh aren’t you adorable. Yes, grabbing people, that’s exactly how you police half the galaxy, it’s not as though I have extensive experience in diplomatic—”

“One job!” Bruce yelled, and he was getting a little afraid for the man’s blood pressure. “Keep a low profile, that was it. That was all you had to do. But instead you set off a chain reaction that involved civilians, and that did major damage to city infrastructure, as well as injured God knows how many people, and for what, so you could save yourself a few minutes’ time on pursuit? Or because you wanted everyone to know there was a Lantern in town?”

Hal eased himself into one of the chairs in front of the monitor bank. He sat there silently a minute, watching the blip on the map of their tagged targets. A couple of possible answers on that one. He was not, of course, all that used to operating on earth, and certainly not under the code of obscurity and shadows that governed Bruce’s work. So that was maybe it. And it could be he was out of practice, too – he had been off active duty for at least six months now, so that could be part of it. 

“I don’t know,” he said absently. 

Or, he had just been tired and wanted it to be over as quickly as possible, and so he had taken a shortcut. And if that was so, then he didn’t belong in the field. And Bruce knew that as well as he did. 

“It turned out okay,” he said. 

That shortcut had cost him four hours’ work. Four hours of energy he didn’t have. He could feel the slow rhythmic trembling in his quads. He would be good for shit tomorrow, and they had even more work to do tomorrow. Not to mention a helicopter to fish out of Singapore harbor. 

A few months ago, he would have vigorously defended every single one of his choices tonight. Maybe the problem wasn’t his performance, but this second-guessing of himself at every turn. “I’m gonna get some rest,” he said, rubbing at his eyes. He stood and headed off to his quarters. Everything in him ached. He wouldn’t let Bruce see it. Wouldn’t let him be right, that this had been too much for him. 

“Hey,” he said, at the door. “Did you. . . were there any more of those people, like before?”

Bruce spun in his chair. “Those people you pulled off the gunship,” he said. “They all claim to remember nothing of this entire evening. Nothing of the last three days, in fact. Their identities check out. They’re bankers, corporate attorneys. One of them is a hotel administrator. And tonight they were flying a weaponized warship with expert precision.”

“Where are they?”

“I sent them home. These were innocent people, and what happened tonight was none of their doing.”

Hal leaned against the metal doorframe. Bruce went back to his work, running more data points through their city map. “There’s something I haven’t told you,” Hal said. “I didn’t mention it before because it didn’t seem. . . related. Or even possible. But that sort of mind control. . . I’ve only ever seen it once before, when—with Parallax.”

Bruce froze. He could see only the back of his head. “Parallax is destroyed,” he said.

“Destroyed is not the word,” Hal said. “He—it—was imprisoned within the Lantern force itself. It should have been an unbreakable prison. But that’s not the same as destroyed.”

“Has the Corps mentioned any possibility of this?”

“No.”

“Then why do you think—”

“Because I saw him.”

Bruce spun to face him. “You what?”

"I saw him. As real as I'm seeing you. Not for long, but—he was there."

"When?"

“Halloween night.”

“Where?”

Hal hesitated. “At the Manor.”

“My house,” Bruce said. “You saw a creature of the most vicious evil we have ever encountered, the purest force of malevolence imaginable, at my house. And it just slipped your mind to mention it to me?”

Hal crossed his arms. “I’m not completely sure it was him.”

“The hell you’re not,” Bruce said. “You know it was. Is that why you’re here? Because you wanted to see for yourself if it was him?”

“No,” Hal said. “I came because I wanted to protect you, if it was.”

Bruce was quiet for a minute, but he didn’t turn back to his screen. He looked thoughtful, tapping his finger. “If it was him,” he said eventually. “If it was, what do you think he wants?”

“I think if he’s Earthside, there’s only one thing he wants. Only one thing he will ever want.” 

“Access to a ring.”

“Access to my ring.”

“So what is your plan?”

“Draw him away from earth, for one thing. And the Corps will need to be informed, and the Guardians. Which I don’t think will go well, because either the Guardians already know, and have been lying to everybody about Parallax’s containment, or, they don’t already know and so will refuse to believe it.”

“And which do you think it is?”

“I want to think it’s B.”

“But in your heart you suspect it’s A.”

Hal shut his eyes and nodded. “Hal,” Bruce said. “You’re talking about going to Oa, and spending serious time wrestling with the Corps and the Guardians. Can you do that?”

Hal opened his eyes. There was nothing left in him, and he wasn’t sure how he was still staying upright, really. “No,” he said. “And maybe I didn’t deal with it before because I knew I couldn’t.”

“Can John help?”

“John doesn’t know what Parallax can do. He’s never seen him, never lived through that. I know Parallax like no one else alive.”

Bruce was taking off his gauntlets, one at a time. He was laying them out, stroking them thoughtfully. “There is a limit,” he said, “to the number of fronts a man can fight on.”

“I know. But if what you’re saying is true, I don’t have a choice.” 

“If you suspect the Guardians are lying, and you confront them, what is the possibility they will retaliate against you? Or keep you confined on Oa, so you can’t sound the alarm?”

“That’s why I’m going to the Corps first. I still have pull there, they’ll listen to me. The Guardians can try to silence me, but the word will get out. We won’t be unprepared like we were last time. I’ll make sure of it. They can’t stop the signal.”

“Everything goes somewhere, and you go everywhere,” Bruce said.

“And that allusion, he gets.” Hal tipped his head against the doorframe, letting his eyes slide shut again. When he opened them, Bruce was standing in front of him. Bruce gripped him and pulled him in. Hal let his head fall onto Bruce’s shoulder. 

“God I’m so fucking tired,” he sighed.

“I know.”

“And I probably fucked up tonight.”

“I know that too.” 

“And I’m so fucking mad that this disease isn’t killing me that I want to punch a wall until my hand breaks, and every other bone in my body. Why the fuck can’t this be terminal? Why the fuck can’t I just fucking die?”

Bruce shifted his head so they were forehead to forehead now. His arms were holding Hal up. It was the first time they had touched since that night at Hal’s place two weeks ago. He had thought maybe they were done, that it wasn’t going to happen again. “Hey,” Hal said. “Hi there. So is this a ‘I’ve got my arms around you in a friendly and supportive way’ kind of thing? Or in the other way? Just want to know before I spring an inappropriate boner.”

He felt the whuff of air that was Bruce’s laugh. “Well,” he said. “You are the one who said you wanted to lick every inch of me.”

“Like friends do,” Hal murmured, and Bruce brushed a thumb against Hal’s face.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Let’s get out of Singapore tonight. We’ve done everything we can do here, seen what we need to see. Let’s get back home, and you can rest, and then you can go do what needs to be done.”

“Okay,” Hal said. “Wait. Shit. I’ve got to get that chopper.”

“I can ask Clark to do it.” 

“You’ll just say Clark, I accidentally might have perhaps dropped a helicopter in Singapore harbor, would you mind grabbing that for me?”

“He does it for me all the time.”

“I completely believe he does. He would do anything you tell him to. The extent to which you are the Regina George of the Justice League is really fucking terrifying.”

“I’m going to pretend I don’t get that allusion.” 

Hal laughed, and he leaned in and brushed against Bruce’s mouth with his. It was a clumsy, not-that-great kiss, because he was exhausted, and Bruce was too, but it was still an electric jolt down all his malfunctioning neurons. “Let’s get some rest, sweetheart,” Bruce whispered, and if the kiss had been an electric jolt, the endearment was a nuclear explosion detonated down his spine. Hal’s eyes opened at it, and met Bruce’s steady gaze, and holy fuck. 

Hal nuzzled against the side of Bruce’s face. “Okay love,” he whispered back, and he felt Bruce’s small stutter of breath. Never let Batman get the better of you, he had said once to Barry, and there was nothing like taking your own advice.

* * *

He didn’t take Bruce’s advice, though, but headed straight to Oa from Singapore. He had waited long enough – way too long, in fact. He should have notified the Corps as soon as he had seen Parallax. It had been an act of cowardice on his part, the flinching away from even saying his name, from reminding people of what had happened. He was angry with himself that he had let those memories get the better of him. And memories was what it was, too. He knew that most people assumed he had no memory of Parallax’s control of his body – or maybe they just wanted that to be true, that he wouldn’t remember. But he did. He remembered it all, even though he hadn’t been the one doing those things but the one screaming from inside the prison of his own body. 

So yeah, possibly he was a little avoidant about reminding people of his time as a supervillain, call him crazy. 

“I understand what you’re saying, Green Lantern Hal Jordan, but I think there are other explanations,” Ganthet said. He had gone to the Corps first, of course, but then he had gone straight to Ganthet.

“Other explanations,” Hal said skeptically. “Like, I’m hallucinating?”

“Well,” Ganthet sighed. “When a possession of that strength and kind happens, it will leave a certain. . . mental residue, if you will. That’s a possibility, that in unlooked-for moments, or moments of emotional vulnerability, if you will, it could return.”

“Oh, and just sit and have a conversation with me? Really?”

Ganthet nodded. “Unlikely, I agree. But. . . there is another possibility, one you probably wish not to think about.”

“That doesn’t narrow it down. I wish not to think about a lot.”

Ganthet’s face crinkled in a smile. “I’m sure. But you have to admit, when it comes to the sort of bond experienced between you and Parallax—”

“Don’t say that. Don’t call it a bond. That’s not what it was, Ganthet.” 

He was standing at a bank of windows, looking out on the roseate Oan sunsets. He watched the movement of spaceships docking in the Tower bays, all the people going about with their regular lives. He had forgotten, striding along the streets and agoras of Oa, how people moved out of the way for a Green Lantern uniform. The quiet deferential nods, the glances his direction. _I think that’s Hal Jordan,_ he had heard one whisper behind him this morning, in a language he didn’t recognize but that the ring did. And an answering whisper: _It can’t be, the real Hal Jordan? Are you sure?_

“Bond is the wrong word,” Ganthet admitted, coming to stand at the window beside him. “But it is unlike anything we have to compare it to. What its long-term effect on you might have been, we can’t really know. It could be that you are tied to him in some way that makes it possible for him to manifest to you, in a way that even seems physical.”

“It _was_ physical,” Hal said. “And what about those people in Singapore, the ones under some kind of hypnotic influence?”

“Why would Parallax – assuming your idea is correct – bother with people on the other side of the planet from you?”

“I don’t know, get my attention?”

“That seems a little, pardon the expression, self-focused.”

Hal gave a laugh. “Batman would just say narcissistic.”

Ganthet frowned. “If you hadn’t seen Parallax, would you have thought it had anything to do with him?”

“You think I’m seeing connections that aren’t there.”

“I think you are tired.”

Hal tightened his jaw at that. Ganthet was the first person on Oa, Guardian or otherwise, to remark on how Hal looked or felt. He had tried to explain to his closest friends in the Corps what was going on with him, but none of them even had a word in their languages for chronic illness. They all lived on planets so advanced that genetic diseases had long since been screened out, and even Kilowogg had furrowed his brow and struggled to understand. Dying he could grasp, but not this. _Well, you and me both, friend,_ Hal had thought.

“You’re saying if I bring this up to the Guardians as a whole – if it’s more than just you and me talking in a room, then they’ll dismiss me.”

“I’m saying, the first thing they’re going to tell you is that Parallax resides where he has for years now, inside the Lantern force.”

“And their proof of that is? I mean, what, can we just take the behind-the-scenes tour of Demented Disneyland here and go check on him? Is it extra for that tram ride?”

“They won’t show you.”

“Then allow me to remain unconvinced.”

Ganthet sighed. He spread his hands wide, and opened a portal. The portal was filled with bright green, but a green that moved and heaved, like molten lava. In the center of all the green was a bright hard yellow, like a rock. The green surged around it, but the yellow was unmoved. “I am not sure how well this translates to human sight,” Ganthet said. “But Parallax is there, and he is contained.”

“So either I’m hallucinating, or I’m a conduit for the most evil supervillain in the history of the universe. Great.”

“Or,” Ganthet said emphatically, closing the portal, “or, there are mechanisms at play in your relationship with Parallax that are beyond our comprehension.”

“Oh really. Beyond even the comprehension of the Guardians?”

Ganthet laughed aloud. “Well don’t tell them I said it,” he said. “Oh wait, before you go. I have been studying a new Earth custom and I wish to practice it. Here,” and he extended his hand, palm down. 

“Ah. . . I think you want to do this,” Hal said, adjusting Ganthet’s hand so it was vertical instead of horizontal. “Otherwise you’re inviting me to kiss your hand, which you know, I respect you and all, but no.”

“Of course! Of course, that is what I meant. And so this is a handshake, yes?”

“Well, now it is,” Hal said, clasping the little man’s hand. As always, when he touched the flesh of a Guardian, he experienced that strange jolt of contact with a substance almost beyond the ability of his senses to grasp. It felt strange, and maybe not quite solid. Ganthet clasped him back.

“Be well, my friend,” Ganthet said, and Hal made a respectful bow as the Guardian glided from the room. 

He flew straight back to Earth, only stopping off at the Watchtower to return the Javelin, but he didn’t go into the Tower or even look around to see who was there. He owed it to Bruce to let him know what he had found out, and he needed to know sooner rather than later. He would go right to the cave and update him, but there was only one decision to be made, and it was non-negotiable. Bruce wasn’t going to like it, but then again, when had Bruce ever really liked any of his decisions?

* * *

He woke to a feeling of pressure, all over him. It was like something lying on top of him, and it was not pleasant. The thing was pressing him down into sleep, and he struggled against it. There were voices nearby. Hal tried to make out words. He thought he knew the voices, maybe.

“—when he was just doing his job.”

A quieter voice answered, speaking for a long time in an indistinct murmur, and then the firmer one again. “Not when he didn’t have a choice,” it said. “With time-sensitive information like this—”

Hal managed a small sound, and the voices stopped. He opened his eyes, and winced at the light. The light resolved itself into windows – high, broad windows. Daylight coming through them. Two people by the windows. One coming closer. 

“You’re supposed to be sleeping,” he said, and it was Bruce. There was something he had to tell Bruce. He would remember it soon.

“What happened,” he whispered.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Coming back to earth. No. I left—I don’t remember. I came back from Oa, I came. . .where am I?”

“You made it to the cave and collapsed. Here, drink this.”

Hal tried to lift his arm, but it didn’t work right. There was a straw at his lips, and he took it obediently. The room was coming clearer. That was Alfred standing over there, looking concerned. Bruce was sitting beside him. He was wearing a snug gray T shirt that was a very nice thing to wake up looking at. Bruce’s arms were nice. This bed was nice. It was his bed. He liked it. He sank back into the warmth and forgot about the pressure on his limbs. The water was cold and slid down his throat.

And then his eyes flew open, and he remembered. “Shit,” he said. He pushed at the weight, pushed at it with all his strength, and sat up. 

“Hal, you need to—”

“Shit shit shit shit shit,” he said, and he pushed even harder, and he stood. There were needles in his arm – why was he on IVs? “No,” he panted. “No no no. I have to get out of here. I have to—go away. Get these—no—” He ripped at the IV, but there was a hand like a vise closing on him, prying his hand away from the IV line. Why couldn’t he move? Why were his muscles not obeying him?

“Hal,” Bruce was saying. “Listen to me. You need to lie down.”

“No, I have to go, I can’t stay here, you don’t understand—”

“You’re not going anywhere. Hal, lie down, you’re going to hurt yourself. Hal—stop that,” Bruce said, grabbing at his hands. 

“I don’t—I can’t—why can’t I move,” Hal said, the panic rising in his middle. 

“Because you’ve exhausted your muscles past their ability to work right now. You’re going to hurt yourself further if you don’t lie down. Hal. Listen to me. Please trust me, all right? Please lie down.”

“I have to—I can’t stay,” he tried, but he was sinking back into the bed, his legs wouldn’t support him any more. “Bruce, you have to listen to me.”

“I’m listening,” Bruce said. “But you can tell me everything you have to tell me from bed. You have no idea what I had to promise to get Leslie to agree to let you stay here instead of the hospital. You have to lie down, or she’s going to come remove my testicles. Come on, that’s it, lie down, there you go.” Bruce was lifting his legs back onto the bed for him. They felt stiff and like they belonged to someone else. 

“I don’t. . . really hurt though,” Hal said.

“I’ll bet you don’t. You’re on enough intravenous painkillers right now to choke a horse, which is another reason you’re going to lie down. And this other IV line is feeding you fluids, because you’re massively dehydrated, and this line over here is giving you intravenous vitamins. So you are going to lie here and rest, and let all of this do its job. Do you understand?”

But Bruce didn’t understand. He didn’t know. Alfred was setting a tray down, and conferring with Bruce about something. Bruce was nodding. Hal waited until Alfred was gone. Bruce went to the kitchen and came back with some coffee. He hadn’t thought to ask how long he had been unconscious. 

“Also,” Bruce said, re-settling beside him. “According to Leslie you’ve lost eleven more pounds, so on that tray is a Bavarian chocolate cake with custard sauce, prepared according to Alfred’s special recipe, guaranteed to cause instant arterial blockage.”

“Bruce listen to me,” he said hoarsely. “I think there’s some connection between Parallax and me. Who knows why it’s started up again now – maybe it’s because I’m sick, maybe my defenses are down, I don’t know. But for some reason he can contact me, can even create some physical manifestations around me. I didn’t want it to be true, but it is.”

Bruce was frowning. “What do the Guardians say?”

“That Parallax is imprisoned, that he can’t get out. But I talked to Ganthet, and he thinks it’s possible, at least on some level. He says he doesn’t know – that no one can know, not really. There’s nothing to compare this to.”

“And there’s nothing to compare it to, because no one has ever survived what you survived.”

“Bruce, if he’s coming for me – if he can contact me in any way, we have no way of knowing what that can mean. But you listen to me, I will not, I will not, put your family at risk because of me. I have to get out of here, I have to get somewhere far away from here, you have to believe me, you have to help me.”

Bruce was looking thoughtful. He reached over to the tray and took a plate. He poured the custard sauce onto it, and began to eat with a spoon, slowly, with concentration. “Actually,” he said, studying the spoon, “I think that is the opposite of the thing to do.”

“The opposite,” Hal said. “What the fuck. Christ, have you not been listening to anything I’ve been saying, can you not understand what—”

“You’re the one who’s failing to understand,” Bruce said. “If what you’re saying is right, then we have to consider what Parallax’s goal is, in reaching out to you. If he’s striking now, then I think you could be correct, it could be that your psychological and physical vulnerability has created an opening for him. But by removing yourself from here, by placing distance between yourself and everything you love, you’re just widening the gap for him. You’re making yourself more vulnerable, not less. I think there’s a case to be made that he’s trying to drive you to more isolation.”

“That doesn’t. . . make sense.”

“Only because you’re high on Versed. Hal, if there is even a fraction of a possibility that this could be more than head games – if he could in fact use that bridge between your minds to escape from his prison and travel to you – then you have to do everything in your power to snap that bridge.”

“And if it’s too late,” Hal said. “If he has me in his sights, and if he’s coming for me, then all I’ve done is paint a target on your back, and on the back of everyone in this house. If you think that’s how I’m going to repay everything you’ve done for me, you’re the one whose judgment is for shit, because I will not allow that, do you hear me? I will not—fucking—allow that—to happen, I won’t, I can’t, that is not—going to happen, all right, I just. . . I just. . .” He shut his eyes, and let the weakness take him. 

“I know,” Bruce said. There was a hand stroking his hair. It kept on stroking. 

“Bruce,” he whispered. 

“Right here.” 

“I have to. . . do the right thing here.”

“I know.”

“I can’t. . . think.”

“Then sleep.”

The hand kept stroking him. It was maybe the nicest thing that had ever happened to him. He wondered if Bruce would stay, while he slept. “I have something to confess,” Bruce said. “Scarlett Johansson did call me, wondering about you.”

“Mocking the cripple,” Hal said in a sleepy murmur. “Hope you’re proud of yourself.”

“I’m not actually joking. She called some time ago, and I never told you. I’m not particularly proud of that, but you should know.”

Hal opened his eyes. Bruce was still sitting right beside him, his hand still on Hal’s hair. “You son of a bitch,” Hal said. “You cockblocked me.”

“I did.”

“Because you want her all to yourself?”

Bruce gave a small smile. “Is that what you think I want,” he murmured. 

“C’mere,” Hal said, and tried to shift over a bit, without much success. But the bed was big, and there was plenty of room for Bruce to climb on. Hal pressed up against him, and the solidity and warmth of him was nice. 

“We gonna get in trouble if Alfred finds us?”

“You know, I don’t actually know the answer to that,” Bruce said.

“Let’s fuck.”

“Jordan. You barely have enough muscle control to swallow right now.”

“Well who said I was gonna swallow, bitch,” Hal said, with a loopy grin, and he was warmed by the soft gust of Bruce’s laugh against his face. 

He might have tried to kiss Bruce, but it was probably more of a face nuzzle, and possibly involved drool. He fell asleep tangled in Bruce’s arms, pressed against Bruce’s chest. He got up to take a leak at some point in the night, pleased to discover his legs were a little more steady underneath him, and equally happy to discover the IV stand was on wheels. He got chilled through just getting out of bed though, and Bruce was waiting for him when he got back in, ready to enfold him. 

“Am gonna need her number though,” Hal whispered, and the arm tightened hard on his middle, choking off his air for a minute. 

He lay there for a while, awake even though he didn’t want to be. Probably because he had slept for some sixteen hours already. He wondered if his sleep would be messed up for weeks now. Maybe he would turn nocturnal, like Bruce. Speaking of, it seemed strange that Bruce was asleep in the middle of the night, instead of awake and prowling around. But then there was a hand that was gently stroking him, so he wasn’t asleep after all. 

The hand moved lower, brushed against his tackle. Hal shifted a bit to give him access, but the hand didn’t stray further. “Come on, don’t tease,” Hal said, and turned to face him. 

They kissed quietly, tentatively. It was different from the way it was before, when they had both been so cranked and practically biting each other’s faces off. This was more hesitant. They took their time. They didn’t say anything, but then Hal didn’t feel up to much talking. His body wanted release, though. He had thought maybe he wouldn’t be able to get it up, and everything felt a little like it was fuzzy and far away, but it was still nice. 

“Like before?” Bruce whispered, getting a hand around their cocks, and Hal nodded into his neck. It was a long, slow ride for him, and Bruce came before he did, which gave him time to appreciate what that looked like – the low groan of it, the clutch and spasm of Bruce’s muscles.

“That feel good?” Hal said, but another groan was his only answer. Hal looped his hand around Bruce’s like he had before, and fucked into Bruce’s slick. Bruce worked a hand down and squeezed his balls, and that made Hal pant and arch. 

“You like that,” Bruce said, and they were learning each other’s bodies, learning what got them going. When Hal came, Bruce’s eyes on him were steady. Hal gasped like a fish. 

They didn’t do anything afterward but lie there watching each other, still exploring. The IV port was aching a bit in Hal’s arm. Probably that was not intended for hand-job type activity. He didn’t feel sleepy anymore. He just wanted to lie here. 

“There are lots of reasons this is not a great idea,” Hal finally said.

“Yes.”

“Not that I give a fuck.”

“No.”

There was more to be said, about whether he should go away or not. He wanted to be persuaded by Bruce’s argument. He wanted it to be true, that he should stay. But he thought of Damian being at risk, of Damian coming into contact with Parallax, and a cold lance of fear went up his spine. Bruce would say, that was just Parallax trying to drive him away from his herd. Hal wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t so sure that Bruce’s argument for staying didn’t come down to other reasons. Was Bruce reasoning with his head, or with his cock, when he said Hal should stay? For that matter, which one was he himself listening to?

Toward dawn he slipped into sleep, and he woke to an empty bed and sunlight spilling through the wide windows. He removed his IV himself, predictably making a mess on the sheets. There was also an uneaten cake on the tray, so he helped himself and hobbled off to take a shower. 

It wasn’t until he was standing under the warm spray, letting it do its work on his aching muscles, that he discovered the problem with his question, about listening to his head or his cock. Because there was a whole other organ in between those two that maybe he had failed to take account of. He had thought it was a question of listening to his head or his cock, but what the fuck was he going to do about his heart?

That was one he didn’t have an answer for.


	10. Chapter 10

Funny how he had had to lose so much of his life to find out what happiness felt like. 

He spent almost a solid week in bed, after Indonesia and Oa. He didn’t have a choice about it, really – he had pushed his body to the wall and beyond, and this was the price, so he just had to be grateful it wasn’t worse. It was kind of like a holiday, truth was. Alfred brought him trays of food, and there were waffles every morning. Damian spent most of his days with him, piled on Hal’s bed with his homework, chattering away at him a mile a minute about astronomy or geometry or whatever book his English tutor had decided he needed to read next, and how stupid/boring/pointless it was, and why weren’t there any books that reflected what actual life was like?

“To be fair kiddo, your life is probably kind of an outlier, in terms of normal pre-teen experience,” Hal pointed out. 

“Oh please. I find it impossible to believe anyone’s life could actually be this boring. Don’t these people ever do anything but go to school and have pointless conversations about pointless things?”

“Well, there’s sports. When I was your age I played a lot of different sports.”

“Father says sports are a waste of my time, that I’m better off sticking to my training.”

“Oh does he now,” Hal said. 

“I suppose there are _some_ sports that aren’t completely ridiculous. Downhill skiing, for instance, teaches all sorts of useful skills. And swimming, of course. And a great deal of my training involves gymnastics, naturally. But the sort of sports where you play on a team with other people, those are for peasants.”

“You ever been to a game? Football, soccer, baseball, anything like that?”

“Of course not.”

“Of course not, he says. Okay, soon as I’m feeling a little better, I’m taking you to a game. Think of it like an investigation – you can find out what all those peasants are going on about. And you might even learn about another little custom we peasants enjoy, called ‘having fun.’”

“I didn’t mean _you_ were a peasant.”

“Oh yeah? Well, I sure as hell didn’t grow up in a place like this, and I didn’t have private tutors and all of this shit.”

“It isn’t lack of money that makes one a peasant,” Damian explained, his brow furrowing. “Peasants are people who are ordinary, not people who are poor. You’re a Green Lantern, you could never be ordinary.”

“Yeah? What if I wasn’t a Lantern anymore – like, what if I couldn’t be? I might have to quit, who knows. Could be I won’t be one forever.”

“You told me it wasn’t the sort of thing you could quit.”

“Here’s some truth for you, kid. I’ve been all over this galaxy, and I’ve met people and life forms you can’t imagine. And in all that time, not once have I met an ordinary person. Everybody’s got something going on, you know? Everybody’s a freak in their own particular way.”

“Hmph,” Damian said, which was his generic sound for _I doubt that,_ but Hal let it go. Damian returned to his sketching, the way he always did when he didn’t want to talk about something any more.

And then there was Bruce. Holy hell, was there Bruce.

Bruce was in his bed every night now, and they were getting a lot more adventurous than hand jobs. Hal had had a lot of sex in his life – like, a _lot_ a lot, and plenty of it (okay, some of it) had been with guys, too, but this was different from all that. He had never really been with someone whose sex drive could match his pace for pace, and who got as hungry for sex as he did. He hadn’t realized that before he had always been aware of when he had to put the brakes on. But there were no brakes with Bruce. 

The first time Bruce had got his mouth around his cock, he thought his brain was going to explode. 

“ _Fuuuuck_ ,” he had moaned, long and low, as Bruce really got going on him. That was when he discovered Bruce’s thing for edging – that what really got Bruce cranked was driving him to the point of gasping agony, and then backing him off, over and over again. Hal’s head had been spinning with it, his body shaking for release. When it had been too much, he hadn’t even been able to warn – he had just come, in massive waves that shot down Bruce’s throat, his fist gripping Bruce’s hair. 

“What the fucking fuck,” he panted afterward, waiting for the room to stop spinning and his skin to resettle on his bones. Bruce was kissing his way up the inside of Hal’s arm. Hal reached a clumsy hand to pull him closer, pull him onto his chest. But he was already doing the math about how there was no way he was going to be able to do that for Bruce. For one thing, he had never sucked off a guy before, and yeah, he was aware of what that said about the opportunistic nature of his sex life. But it wasn’t like it was astrophysics. And truth was, getting his mouth on every square inch of that magnificent body was all he wanted to do anyway.

“How do you feel about fucking,” Bruce whispered in his ear one night, as they were grinding. 

“Sure,” Hal said, and Bruce stopped, reared back a little.

“How convincing,” he said, and Hal laughed. 

“Well excuse me for not being capable of whole paragraphs right now. You mean like. . . right now?”

But Bruce was already rummaging for lube in Hal’s bottom drawer. Okay, sure, that was fine. He was not gonna let on that this was a little outside his comfort zone, though he was mildly pissed at Bruce’s assumption here. Then Bruce had hold of his hand and was rubbing his fingers with lube, and leading them to his ass, and. . . oh. 

“You want me. . . to fuck you?” Hal said hesitantly.

“Hal,” he said, in that low husk of a voice, and Hal slipped fingers inside his rim, felt Bruce’s shudder, his acceleration of breath, the small clench, and oh fuck.

“Hang on baby,” Hal whispered. Their fucking that night was fast and hungry – just him on top of Bruce, who was face-down in the mattress and grinding on it while Hal fucked him. He let Bruce take it how he wanted, did his best to follow Bruce’s cues, and Bruce would push forward to rub himself on the bed, then back onto Hal’s cock a bit more. They didn’t say anything, but their breathing was so loud. 

Bruce reached an arm around to Hal’s ass, pressed him in. Hal shut his eyes at how good it felt. “I’m gonna cum,” he gasped, and Bruce arched back. “Just fuck me,” he said, and Hal let go, and as he was thrusting he felt Bruce’s hole clench around him, felt Bruce coming. Hal fucked him through it and spilled in a hot wave, imagining his cum painting Bruce’s insides, riding Bruce’s sweet ass until his body just gave out, until there was nothing left of him. 

“What do you know,” Bruce said, as they were lying there in the wake of it, “you’re actually not bad at that.”

Hal turned his head to stare at him. And then he laughed so long and hard he could barely get air. He rolled over and just gave himself to it, because it felt so good just to laugh. “For God’s sake,” Bruce said drily, and Hal just laughed some more. 

“No no,” he managed, in between bouts of it. His belly hurt with it. “I just – that is exactly how surprised you are whenever I am remotely competent at something, and I don’t know why I thought fucking you in the ass would be any different, but here we are, and somehow Batman is _still_ busting my balls, I mean do you never get tired of—” and he let another wave of laughter take him. And then he really couldn’t get air, because Bruce was pressing a pillow down into his face, and he was laughing even harder. 

He hadn’t thought much of it when Bruce had pointed out the handicap accessibility in the bathroom, back when he had moved in. But he sure as hell thought about it now that they were fucking, because they fucked on every available surface of his apartment and quite a few that should technically have been unavailable. And the shower was best of all, with those handlebars. God, Bruce’s body was a fucking amusement park, and he would never get to the end of it. 

He was starting to realize he had never actually spent that much time in bed before, with anyone. Carol was his longest relationship, and they had had a hell of a lot of sex, but it hadn’t been quite like this – long lazy marathon sessions, followed by lying there just watching each other, just drifting, maybe talking a bit, maybe not. Hal would weave his fingers in Bruce’s and they would just lie there. Or Bruce would get an idea in his head – Bruce got a lot of those – and decide to spend an hour mapping every inch of Hal’s body, stroking it, studying it, examining it like it was a new investigation he had opened and was determined to solve.

And they slept together, too. Was it weird that he had never really done that too much, even with Carol? Probably it was. He had always thought of himself as this really open guy, the life of the party really, with tons of friends, tons going on in his life – unlike that brooding loner Batman. He found himself thinking of what Bruce had said – _isn’t alone the whole point of you?_ Maybe he had been right. When the shit had hit the fan in his life, he had shut himself off from everyone and everything, but that hadn’t been that different from the way he had spent his life before that: Hal Jordan, the guy who didn’t need anyone. 

He found himself thinking about that, in the middle of the night.

“Come back,” Bruce said, brushing a hand on his forehead, and Hal turned to him, let himself be pulled into his arms and rest there.

“You ever wonder,” he murmured.

“Hmm.”

“Ever wonder why this is so easy now?”

Bruce’s hand stopped stroking. “What do you mean?”

“I mean why now, and not five years ago? For you and me, I mean. Am I different? Or are you? Because I don’t fucking want it to be that I got sick. I don’t want it to be that.”

Bruce sighed, settled an arm behind his head. “I know my saying it might make you laugh yourself sick again, but you need to stop overthinking this.” 

“By this you mean us.”

Bruce was carding fingers in his hair. “I’ve gotta get it cut,” Hal said sleepily.

“Mmm no you don’t.”

“Yeah, you just say that ‘cuz you like it long.”

“Gives me something to yank when I can’t take any more of your inadequate blow jobs.”

Hal grinned and raised on his elbows. He brushed a kiss on Bruce’s mouth, on the stubbly side of his face. “Yeah, you sure seemed to be suffering, earlier tonight,” he whispered. He let his kiss become gentler, and Bruce’s mouth opened beneath his. It occurred to him there was nothing he wanted in bed that Bruce was going to say no to. That was quite the turn-on. 

“Hey let’s fuck,” he said. “But I wanna try a different position.”

“Jordan, on the literal ceiling isn’t going to work. We’ve discussed this.”

“Not what I meant,” Hal said, kissing at his eyes, the sharp slant of his cheekbone. That first morning in the house he had thought it was weird to see Dick kiss him. Now he knew Bruce leaned into kisses like a cat. He reached for the lube and coated Bruce’s fingers, rolling over onto his stomach.

“This is not something you have to like,” Bruce said, rubbing at his spine. 

“Yes, Bruce, that is one hundred percent why I want you to fuck me in the ass: peer pressure.”

Bruce’s stinging slap of his ass made him laugh. “In some universe was that actually supposed to hurt?” Hal said. 

Bruce grabbed his arm and twisted it behind his back, and it did actually hurt, but Hal kept laughing. Bruce bent his mouth to Hal’s ear. “Don’t let me go too far,” he whispered, and “I won’t,” Hal whispered back, but just that suggestion of _too far_ had his cock thickening, because Christ, now he knew what he wanted – he wanted Bruce to let go, wanted him to go too far. 

They got rough that night, and Hal loved it – gloried in it. It felt fucking great for someone not to treat his body like this breakable thing, to not be fragile anymore. And maybe it was pretend, maybe Bruce was watching the whole time and keeping a careful leash on how far he could bend Hal’s muscles, but he knew Bruce pretty well, and he knew Bruce was a little beyond thinking and calculating when he was finally buried balls-deep in Hal. He did pause at the beginning, though.

“That feel good?” he husked, in Hal’s ear, and Hal groaned, pushed back into him. That was the last time Bruce stopped to ask that night, and Hal came so hard. So fucking hard.

* * *

Being on bedrest did not mean that he literally had to stay in bed – or at least, he was going to assume it didn’t mean that. He spent some afternoons lying on the sofa, and he took some walks around the grounds. He used the ring to warm himself, because December had set in for real now, and the wind whipped through to his bones. He didn’t remember being so cold, before. He wondered if that had something to do with the Marchand’s, or if maybe he was just getting old. 

He explored a bit, taking walks slowly, stopping to rest when he needed to. There were lots of benches in the gardens, lots of tall hedges and narrow passageways, so he never had to go far before finding the next bench. It was like something out of a book. One afternoon he turned a corner to find a small black iron gate, and a few headstones. One or two taller monuments. He opened the gate and went to sit inside for a bit. He sat there and considered the tombstones for a while, and the names on them. He had known the family graveyard was here, theoretically, but in his head it had been somewhere far from the house, remote and windswept. But this was a strangely peaceful spot. The quiet homeliness of this little place took him aback. He wondered if Bruce ever came here. 

He took his time walking back, bundled up against the wind that had decided to turn mean. He was blowing on his hands by the time he made it back to the carriage house, and part of that was, he knew, the fact that his circulation sucked ass these days. That was part of the MD, his body’s inability to regulate temperature, but cold had gone from being a minor annoyance to a dominating fact of his life, and the minute his muscles encountered any cold, they locked up and decided to fuck him over for the rest of the day. 

“There you are,” Damian said imperiously when he stepped off the elevator, but then Damian said everything imperiously.

“Took a walk,” he said. “What’s up?”

“Nothing. Just looking for a place to spread these out without Titus treading all over them.” 

Hal glanced at what the kid was working on – some kind of drawing. There were sheets and sheets of paper, and he had them arranged on the floor while he worked, hunched over in concentration and adding some shading to this paper, some more lines to that one. Hal bent beside him to watch, immediately regretted it, and tried to gracefully segue into a chair. 

“You ought to have been wearing the brace,” Damian muttered, frowning at an angle on his paper. 

“Everybody’s got an opinion,” Hal said. “What is this, you gonna tape all these together or something?”

"It's a plan for a mural."

"Oh yeah? Where you gonna put it?"

“It’s just theoretical. I could never actually do it.”

“Why not?”

“Well for one thing a mural is on a wall, Lantern. The Latin etymology makes that clear, which you would know if you had ever studied Latin.”

“I’ve been a little too busy studying thirteen alien languages, thanks. What’s it supposed to be?”

“Art isn’t _supposed_ to be anything.” Damian glanced at him and got up to fiddle with the thermostat. “You’ve frozen yourself,” he said.

“I’m fine,” Hal said, but reached for a blanket and wrapped in it. He studied Damian’s drawings. What at first he had thought were abstract shapes were wings – large bird wings, small ones, all rushing together, overlapping. The detailing was gorgeous. 

“You could do it, though,” Hal said after a bit.

“Do what?”

“Paint it on a wall. You could do it here.”

Damian stared at him. “You mean. . . in your apartment?”

“Sure, why not? Give me something to look at. And it’d be cool, too, ‘cuz I’ve got all those windows on that wall, and the wings and shit would be a nice touch. Like the birds flew in here through the windows.”

Damian was still just staring at him. “It’s. . . it’s not like drawing. Painting a mural is completely different. I don’t have. . . I don’t have any of the things I would need.”

“Well why couldn’t we get some? You make us a list of supplies, and I’ll take you into the city to get stuff at an art store. They’re bound to have one or two of those around.”

“You’re supposed to be on bed rest.”

“I won’t tell if you won’t.”

“Driving tires you.”

Hal looked at the sheets of paper, all those feathery wings. “Everything tires me,” he said. He meant it to sound lighthearted, but the weird clench in his throat made it sound wrong. Damian’s solemn face and dark eyes watched him. Sometimes it was like looking right at Bruce, they were so alike, but those dark eyes got him every time – he kept expecting them to be lighter, like Bruce’s. Bruce’s eyes were so light sometimes, and so intense at others – like the underneath of a glacier. And like a glacier, most of what went on behind those eyes was hidden from view.

Jesus Christ, he was in tough shape. He was literally sitting here thinking about Bruce’s eyes, for fuck’s sake. 

“Aswad, no!” shouted Damian, but it was too late – the cat had bounded silently up the stairs and was as always in possession of a bloody carcass, which it was dragging onto Damian’s drawings, making a mess of all of them.

“Hey get out little fuckface!” Hal yelled, and the cat slunk off, leaving pawprints spattered with mud and blood behind him, over every single one of the drawings. Hal would have expected Damian to be beside himself, but he was quiet, hunched over on the floor.

“Hey kid, it’s okay, maybe we can clean some of these,” he said.

“No,” Damian said, his voice small and sad, and it took Hal a second to realize it wasn’t the drawings he was bent over, but the small bloody bit of fluff on top of them. It was a baby mole, its perfect little velvety nose poking up, its body a mangled mess. Worst of all, it was still twitching. Its eyes were open, and its chest was heaving. Hal lifted the ring to quickly finish it, but Damian had lifted the little mess in his arms, and was cradling it. 

“Damian,” Hal said quietly, but the kid shook his head. He bent over the little creature, holding it to his face – and Hal was just about to tell him not to do that, he was going to end up with some horrible disease and it would be all his fault – when something happened. A little shudder in Damian’s body, some trick of the light – he couldn’t have said. But then Damian put his hands down, gently, and the little mole was whole and perfect. The whole thing was over in two seconds, and if Hal hadn’t seen it, he wouldn’t have believed it. One minute the mole was gasping for life, the next minute it was unhurt, no speck of blood or trace of mauling on it.

“Damian,” Hal said again, because he didn’t know what else to say. Damian spread his fingers, and the little creature scampered out of his hand, its tiny waddling body hastening away. 

“How,” Hal said, his throat dry. 

“I don’t know,” Damian said. 

“This. . . this is what you meant earlier, about being able to do things, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Well this is really amazing, and I’d love to talk about it more, but right now you are aware you just released a rodent into my house, right?”

“Oh,” Damian said. “Right. It’s. . . well I’m sure it’s around here somewhere. It will turn up. Also, moles aren’t rodents, they’re talpids.”

“Kid, it is small and furry. You resurrect it, you bought it. Go find that hairy little fucker and get him out of here.”

“Fine, fine. I don’t see what the problem is, you could just set out a dish of earthworms and in no time at all – there you are,” Damian said, scooping up the little thing just as it was waddling toward Hal’s bed. “Hmm, I suppose I ought to raise him, since there’s no hope of finding his family now, and he’s far too young to be on his own. Keeping him away from the cats will be the trick, but if we put a gate at the base of your stairs—”

“No way, you get that thing out of here. Go on, get out, both of you, and your little mice friends too, Cinderella. No wait, that’s probably another movie reference you don’t get, isn’t it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, I’ve read Perrault’s Cendrillon as well as seen Massenet’s opera, so I don’t know what you could possibly—”

“ _Does no one in this family watch fucking TV?_ ” Hal shouted down the stairwell after Damian’s retreating form, and he heard the boy’s cackle as he trotted down the stairs and out into the garden, his furry little bundle clutched in his arms.


	11. Chapter 11

The next morning he spent some time in the library up at the Manor. It was raining, so no walks for him today, and Bruce was spending most of his days at the office right now, doing whatever inscrutable thing he did there. 

“What exactly do you do at the office when you go there,” he had said in bed last night, propped on an elbow and studying Bruce.

“Whatever my secretary tells me to.”

“Yeah but. . . you run a multibillion-dollar multinational corporation. That’s got to represent at least some work on your part.”

“You’d be surprised how little.”

“God that is fucking depressing.” He flopped back and stared at the ceiling, thinking about that one. “So. . . your secretary runs Wayne Corp, Alfred runs your house, and what is it you do again? I’m starting to feel like the whole Batman thing was really just because you had too much time on your hands.”

“It’s not impossible.” Bruce had picked up his hand and was toying with it, looking at the Lantern ring. Hal had a sudden quick thought of telling him what he had witnessed with Damian, just a few hours before. It would have been a good moment to do it. There was no reason not to do it. But for some reason he didn’t. If Damian wanted to have that conversation with Bruce, then he would have it, he told himself. 

“Are you going to train Damian to take over the company some day?”

“No, that’s really more Tim’s gift.” Bruce was lifting the hand to his mouth now, idly kissing at the fingers. Hal wondered what it would be like, to have billions upon billions of dollars at your disposal, and to have to figure out who would get what. Sometimes when he thought about how much Wayne money there actually was, it made him sick to his stomach. Of course he knew the spigots of the Wayne Foundation’s flow of money was always open, and he knew how much Wayne money was sunk in the Justice League. And of course funding Batman, that took a hell of a lot of money. But still. 

“Where’s your head?” Bruce said, putting the hand down and sliding closer to Hal. 

“Sorry,” he whispered. “I’m here.” 

Bruce’s eyes studied him in the dark. “Not yet,” he said. “Let’s see what I can do about that.” And he bent his head to Hal’s, his mouth as always obliterating everything else for Hal. 

Sometimes he wondered if Bruce was aware of the effect he had on Hal, and used that to divert conversations from places he didn’t want them to go. Of course that wasn’t fair, Hal himself probably had a similar effect on Bruce. Maybe. Possibly. Hard to tell, with Bruce. There were layers and layers, and even when Hal thought he had hit bedrock, there were still watchful layers underneath. What Bruce truly wanted, or truly thought about anything. . . that was not so easy to tell, and Hal had gotten pretty good at reading him. Good enough to know how far he was from the whole picture, that was for sure. Good enough to know that there were locked doors in Bruce he would never push back, never be granted access to. 

So no, maybe he didn’t tell him about Damian. Maybe there were things he wanted to keep or himself, too.

But it did occur to him that there might be something in that vast library that might tell him more about what had happened with Damian than any google search could. So the next morning he trudged up to the house in the rain and spent some time wandering the vast cabinets of antique books in their glass cases – and sure enough, there were cabinets and cabinets on supernatural shit. All of it was really old, though, and the name inscribed on the flyleaf of several of the volumes was no Bruce’s – or his father’s, either. Maybe it was Bruce’s grandfather, or great-grandfather, judging by the age of some of them. 

None of the books was really helpful, unless you were interested in things like the history of the Salem witch trials, or how to create a golem, or the exact time of day to harvest silphium, which a bit of cross-referencing told him was extinct anyway. But the golem stuff was at least fun, and he found a note in one of the books that looked like it was newer – it said something about looking in Vespasian Four, whatever the fuck that was. A star system he had never heard of, maybe. He was sliding the golem book back on its shelf when he glanced up and saw the bust on top of the cabinet. A Roman soldier dude, or maybe an emperor. He could just see the little brass label that said “Augustus.” 

“Well, fuck me,” he said, and quickly looked around at all the cabinets – he hadn’t noticed it, but they all had busts, and all had labels like that. So he eventually found Vespasian, and the rest of the golem books, but those sent him over to Tiberius Eleven (the eleventh shelf, he quickly figured out) and he spent the rest of the afternoon in a deep dive into medieval Jewish literature. 

_A Guide for the Perplexed_ , read the spine of one of them. “Well I sure as fuck am perplexed,” he muttered, pulling it down from the shelf. This was definitely the book for him. He ended up curled on the velvet sofa trying to puzzle his way through it, way more perplexed than when he had opened the damn thing. Most of it, he had no idea what the dude was talking about, and the 19th-century translation was probably not helping matters, but every now and again he would get glimpses of what was going on, like when he was talking about the nature of God, and what the end of the world would be like, and whether the universe was eternal or created. Hal had flown around and among the stars for years, and never really thought about that one. And here this guy had never even traveled in a car, and he had thought more about the nature of the universe than Hal had. 

So maybe Jim didn’t know everything about being Jewish, if this guy was also Jewish. This was more like philosophy and science mixed together, and while nine-tenths of it made zero sense to him, it was sure as fuck whole worlds away from what Hal had thought Judaism was. Why had no one ever taught him about any of this shit? Maybe if they had learned some of this stuff when they were kids, Jim wouldn’t have turned into such a flaming asshole who thought he was head of the class at Jew School. Just one more thing Martin and Jessica had fucked up, what a surprise. 

He let the book rest on his chest, and drifted for a while, there in the warmth of the library while the rain pattered against the tall windows. He wondered if the ring would have any trouble translating this book from the original Hebrew, or whatever it had been written in. Could it read ancient Earth languages? 

He woke to the sound of the door clicking shut behind Alfred, who was bringing in a tray loaded with food.

“Hey,” Hal said sleepily, trying to sit up. “You didn’t need to—I mean, thank you. That looks. . . amazing.”

“Well, a rainy day, and not much else to do but putter about in the kitchen. I thought something warm might be welcome. If I had known you were in here I would have started the fire.”

Hal extended his hand and used the ring to pile on the logs that were resting on the hearth, which he ignited into instant crackling fire. “Well what do you know,” Alfred said. “That thing does come in handy occasionally, doesn’t it?”

“My crackerjack toy,” Hal said, and Alfred looked at him curiously. “That’s what Bruce used to call it.”

“Ah,” Alfred said, settling on the chair opposite him. “I would imagine,” he said, “knowing him as I do, that he found the ring quite a bit unsettling, when he first encountered you.”

“Hah,” Hal said. “That’s one word for it. Though I think it was less the ring than me.”

“I would venture to say,” Alfred said. He reached for the kettle and poured himself a cup of tea, and plucked a scone from the tray, which he chewed meditatively. “I would venture to say, that it was neither you nor the ring he objected to, but the unadulterated power the ring represents. That much power in the wrong hands is a terrifying possibility.”

Hal said nothing. He wondered if Alfred knew about his possession by Parallax, and exactly how much death and destruction had been caused by the ring’s power being in exactly the wrong hands. “At any rate,” Alfred resumed, “eat some of my scones, if nothing else. I used fresh gooseberries, and I am justly proud. Your presence in the house is always a pleasure, Master Harold, because it means my culinary efforts do not go to waste.”

“Always happy to oblige,” Hal said, piling his plate with Alfred’s creations. “Hey maybe if we puree some of these into a shake and throw some kale on it, you could get Bruce to eat it.”

Alfred concentrated on his scone and did not answer, and Hal took the silence as his rebuke. They drank their tea, warmed by the fire as the rain and wind picked up speed outside. “Quite the interesting research you’ve been conducting,” Alfred said after a while, nodding at the stack of books by the sofa. 

“Yeah well, quite the interesting collection you’ve been amassing, I’d say.”

“Oh, all of those books are far older than my tenure in the house. Far older than Bruce’s – from the looks of what you’ve got there, most of those are his grandfather’s collection. I don’t know too much about him, but I do know that he had a keen interest in the supernatural, and other bits of esoteric lore. If you’re interested in Maimonides, you might also like to explore some of the kabbala section of the library, over in the Nero cabinet.”

“Probably too much for me. The air is getting a little thin in some of these books for a flyboy.”

Alfred gave him a sharp glance. “I doubt that very much,” he said. 

They settled back into companionable silence, and Alfred appeared lost in thought, his tea forgotten, saucer perched on his knee as he studied the fire. “Is the carriage house warm enough?” he said after a while.

“Warm enough? Yeah, it’s great, no problems with the heat as far as I know.”

“Well, it’s early days. Winter is just beginning, you might find those windows drafty when the cold really sets in. I advised removing one or two of them, when Master Bruce was re-making the place, but he thought the light was more important. There’s only so much insulation one can install, in such a rickety old building as that. At any rate, if it gets too cold, you should feel free to come up to the house and winter here, if that’s more comfortable for you.”

“The carriage house is great, but thank you. I’ll keep it in mind.”

Alfred set his saucer back on the tray. “When Master Bruce was little,” he said, “gooseberry scones used to be his favorite. He was quite impossible – worse by far than Master Damian, when it came to descending on food like a plague of locusts. I thought he was going to eat us all out of house and home. He used to love sweet things especially. Used to love to cook with me in the kitchens, especially when I was making pastry.”

“I guess. . . all his training probably changed that, huh.”

Alfred studied him, a long penetrating look. “Is that what you think,” he said. “You think it’s an act of discipline, that he eats as spartanly as he does.”

“To be fair, discipline is kind of his brand.”

“Well you’re not wrong. And it is discipline, of a sort. The discipline that tells him exactly how many calories a day he must consume to maintain his strength and muscle mass, and he follows that discipline these days. Mostly. With occasional reminders.” Alfred was back to staring into the fire. 

“There are all sorts of ways,” he said, “to not be alive. After his parents’ death, getting him to eat anything was a challenge. I suppose I didn’t think about it enough. I was young myself, and with a child all in my own care – what did I know? He had to be hospitalized before the end of the year, because he wouldn’t eat.”

“Jesus.”

“Jesus, yes, and any god who would listen. I prayed to all of them, trying to figure out how to help him. When you’re a child and just want to erase yourself, when you blame yourself so profoundly for the death of your family, starvation seems like the obvious solution, I suppose.”

“How did you. . . I mean, what fixed it?”

“You think it’s fixed?”

“Yeah, I guess not really, huh.”

“You’re right that his training is responsible for the way he eats, but only in the sense that his training is responsible for the fact that he eats at all. Learning that kind of discipline, learning to respect and value his body, that’s what got him eating. Taught him the purpose and values of eating – the purpose and value of life, really, when I had failed quite spectacularly to do so. But it’s a problem that’s never really gone away. It doesn’t, really, not that sort of thing.” 

“You think you failed,” Hal said. 

“A mixed lot, like so much in life.” Alfred reached for the tray and poured Hal some more tea. “But it came right in the end, or right enough I suppose. None of us is without our issues, of course, but he’s the best man I know, so that’s something.”

“Second best,” Hal said, and his look at Alfred was long and steady. Alfred met his gaze, and then gave a quirk of a smile.

“Well you think quite highly of yourself, don’t you?” he said, and Hal laughed aloud. Alfred’s smile deepened, and they sat there like two old men, quietly chuckling at the fire. Truth was, he thought, his life was kind of like being an old man these days, and once you got past the aches and pains of it – once you gave in to your body’s limitations and demands – being old was pretty fucking awesome. He just wished being old hadn’t happened quite so soon in his life. 

Funny to think that Bruce had spent most of his life wanting out of his body, and Hal would give anything to have his body back.

* * *

He ended up sleeping away most of the day on the sofa in the library, and woke to find the fire a pleasant hum of coals on the grate, and the storms subsided to a wet grayness outside. Alfred and the tray were gone. 

“Was wondering when you were going to wake up,” the voice said, and Hal sat bolt upright, his heart pounding.

“You’re not real,” he said. There it sat, looking exactly like it had before – him, but yellow. Clothed in a sick mockery of the Lantern uniform. Sitting in Alfred’s chair. 

“Of course I’m not real you idiot. You really had to take a trip to Oa to figure that one out? I’m what’s left of me inside of you – or what’s left of you inside of me, however you want to work that one out. Probably too much for your dimensional little brain to handle, isn’t it? Like explaining quasars to chipmunks.”

Hal raised his ring to banish the vision, to shatter it like before. Snap the connection, Bruce had said. So all he had to do was think it away. Push the vision away, and it would be gone. He shut his eyes, turned away from it. 

“You think I’m here to frighten you, Hal? You think I’m the bogeyman, and you can slam the closet door shut on me? Well, maybe I misspoke – you know all about closet doors, don’t you?”

“Fuck right off,” Hal said, grinding his teeth.

“Rude. I’ll be going in just a minute anyway, your mind is too weak to keep this up for long. So I’ll get right to the point, Hal. I’m here to do business with you. You have something I want, and I have something you want. Quid pro quo. You ready to a do a deal?”

He struggled up, so he was standing now, his fists clenched. “Get the fuck out of here,” he said. “Get out of this house. You have no fucking right to be in this house. Get out.” He raised the ring to sweep the thing away in a construct.

Parallax folded his arms and waited. “Go on,” it said. “Go on and do it then. I mean, nothing I have to say could possibly be of any interest, right? Not nearly as interesting as your life in this little cage, where they bring you food and take care of you like all the other pets around here. What could be better than that, am I right?”

“You shut your fucking mouth,” Hal said, and he hated the quaver in his voice. 

“You’re a pet, Hall-eo. Face it. All your needs are met – even your need to get righteously fucked, and Bruce probably figures sure, I can do that for him too, whatever it takes. Because he will do whatever it takes, make no mistake. You know why, only you won’t admit it. It’s like the man said – all that power. Can’t have that running around loose now, can he? Especially when the one wielding all that power is crumbling to pieces, not to put too fine a point on it. Smart move, on his part. Keep you contained, keep you under surveillance, and keep a pet Lantern for himself when he needs one.”

“That’s not true.”

“You’re an idiot if you think he looks at you and sees anything but power, power he wants but can’t have, power he can figure out how to control. He’s always wanted to get closer to the antern Force, and finally, without even having to do much, it falls into his lap. Literally, you little slut.”

“You. . .know. . . _nothing_. . .about him,” Hal ground out.

“You’re right, I don’t. But I know you, from the inside out. I know everything you’re thinking, everything you’re feeling. Everything I’m saying comes from you, from your brain. It’s what you’re already thinking, because I know you like no one else ever will. I will always be a part of you, Hal, just like you’re always a part of me. How else are we talking right now?”

“We’re not. We’re not talking. Go away. Get the fuck out of here.”

“Oooh, now you’re thinking about running away again. Thinking you should have done it a while ago. Fine, do it, go ahead. Run to Bora Bora if you want, you’re not gonna go anywhere in the universe that I’m not right there with you. It makes no difference to me where you are.”

“You stay the fuck away from this family,” Hal managed.

Parallax looked around him like he was noticing where he was for the first time. “Oh,” he said. “Huh. Actually, this is kind of nice, isn’t it? No wonder you like your cage so much. Newsflash, Hal, I’m here to see you. I don’t actually give a fuck about anyone else. So here’s the deal we need to talk about. If you and I—”

“ _NO!_ ” Hal shouted, and he lifted the ring and pushed with everything in him, pushed at the wall that he felt. It wasn’t like before, where the construct had swept Parallax away. This required effort, and he felt the moment of give when he knew he had succeeded, and the thing was gone, but it had been so hard, and his limbs felt like lead, like he was swimming in thick syrup, like a dream where you had to run and couldn’t, somehow. He clutched at the mantel to keep himself from falling, but there were arms holding him up.

“Hal,” Bruce said. “What’s wrong?”

Hal collapsed into his arms, shaking. Had it been a hallucination? Had none of it been real? “Come on, come lie back down,” Bruce was saying, and the arms around him were leading him to the sofa, were soothing him, helping him, bringing pillows for him. Like a pet, Parallax had said. _No, no, fuck him, no_ , Hal thought, but he couldn’t get the poison out of his head. 

Bruce was kneeling by the sofa. “Hal,” he murmured. “You were supposed to rest.”

“I did. I just. . . got a little dizzy. Sorry. The leg just gave, I guess.”

“The idea of getting the brace is that you were supposed to be occasionally wearing it.” 

But if it was true that Parallax was only focused on him, what was up with all that mind control in Singapore? Had that just been to get his attention? It couldn’t be connected to this, especially if all Parallax was capable was this kind of residual aftereffect, or whatever the hell it was. Like indigestion. A bit of undigested beef, like Scrooge said. Should he talk to Ganthet again? Head back to Oa? Or no – maybe Zatanna. Maybe this was some kind of magic, something beyond dimensional reality. What was it Parallax had said? _Your dimensional little brain._

Bruce was kneeling beside the sofa, watching him. “Sorry,” Hal said again. 

“You were close to passing out.”

“Yeah, I just need to. . . sit down a little. I probably didn’t have enough to eat, that’s all. How was. . . how was the day at the office?”

Bruce’s gaze was steady. He knew there was something. Could probably see it all over Hal’s face. He knew he sucked ass at lying. Not like Bruce, who was definitely expert at it. Bruce sat back on his heels, still watching him. 

“The office was fine,” he said. “I had lunch with Clark, which was interesting.”

“Oh yeah? How’s Big Blue?”

“He’s doing well.”

“Anything going on, or was this just your regular bro job?”

“That’s quite the exotic description of my salad. It was our regular Tuesday lunch, but he did have something he wanted to tell me. He asked Lois to marry him, and naturally she said yes.”

“You’re kidding,” Hal said.

“You’re surprised she said yes?”

“No, I mean I thought they were already married. How are they not already married?”

Bruce’s brow furrowed. “You thought they were married.”

“Yeah, didn’t they? I thought they were. I don’t know, who can keep track.”

Bruce shut his eyes briefly. “No, you galloping narcissist, they are not already married. But they will be soon – they’re going to do it in the next six weeks, in fact.”

“Oh come on, I’m not a narcissist for not being able to keep track of Clark’s boring love life.”

“And why pray tell is Clark’s love life boring?”

“Because any relationship involving Clark is going to have three things in it that are intensely boring: heterosexuality, relentless monogamy, and Clark.”

“I see,” Bruce said. “Well, you didn’t find heterosexuality that boring when you were fucking Scarlett Johansson in my house, and you haven’t found Clark boring any of the numberless times he has saved your ass, but it’s useful information to know what you think about fidelity, I suppose.” Bruce rose lightly. 

“Oh please, I didn’t mean—”

“Do me a favor,” Bruce said. “I know you’ve got a lot to do in your very busy life, but as a personal favor to me, please consider putting ‘go fuck yourself’ right at the top of your to-do list.”

“Listen, asshole—” Hal started, but Bruce had slammed the library door behind him, hard. The door was heavy enough that it reverberated in the frame, and the noise of the slam echoed in the library. Hal put his head in his hands.

“Shit,” he muttered. What the fuck had just happened? Bruce was being irrational. He grabbed the Maimonides volume and headed to the door. His quad had locked like the stupid motherfucker it was, and yes, he should have worn the brace, but he didn’t want Bruce to be right about anything. He hobbled his way to the door and took the back hallways to the outside, so he wouldn’t run into anyone.


	12. Chapter 12

He woke in the middle of the night to some unwelcome clarity. 

He swung his legs over, and fitted on the brace. He slipped on clothes, and a warm jacket, and was just heading to the elevator door when he paused, a hand on the wall. 

_Keep you under surveillance,_ hissed the voice in his head. He knew for a fact almost every inch of the Manor was under video and probably audio surveillance, though how many of those cameras were active there was no way of knowing. Who was to say whether Bruce had done the same thing in the carriage house, when he had refurbished it? Probably he had. He could check. The ring could check. It would be a matter of two seconds, to do a quick scan.

“Shut up,” Hal snarled, at the thing in his head. He leaned his head on the wall. It was Parallax. Parallax had put that in his head, and he would not let it win. “No,” he said aloud, and hit the elevator button. 

He made his slow way up to the Manor, and let the ring shield him from the cold, which was starting to mean business. He opened the doors as quietly as possible, hoping he wouldn’t wake Damian’s ginormous slobberhound, but it was probably upstairs with Damian in his room. Funny to realize that there were no locked doors anywhere in the Manor – when the property itself was a fortress, there was no point in locking any external doors. When the property was in lockdown at night, there was nothing short of a ballistic missile – and probably not many of those – that would penetrate this house. 

He took his time on the stairs, but even so, his legs were not in great shape by the time he made it to the third floor. He paused at the heavy oak door, his hand on the knob. He wondered if he would find it locked. He tried it, just a little. It gave, and he stepped inside. The room wasn’t full dark, because there was the tail end of a fire in the fireplace, giving a bit of a glow, at least on that end of the room. The bed was far enough away that it was full dark over there. 

Hal limped over to the bed and sat on it. Bruce had two sleep modes: light as a cat, or comatose for days, and there was no predicting which he would be in at any given time. Weird that he now knew Bruce’s sleeping habits. Maybe that was the sort of inside information Barry was looking for. He should call him up and tell him. Come to think of it, there was a lot he had to catch Barry up on. But he knew he wouldn’t. 

He didn’t have to turn around to know Bruce was awake. 

“I saw Parallax today,” Hal said. 

He heard Bruce shift behind him, maybe sitting up. He wanted to turn around, because Naked Bruce did not ever get old, but he needed to keep his focus. “He was – it was in the library. Not long, but. . . longer than before. I got rid of him, but it was harder than before. And he. . .”

Hal swallowed. “Anyway,” he said. “You needed to know. And I was jumpy as hell afterward, and then you came in, and. . . I said some shitty things I don’t mean. Things that were about me, not you. I was just looking to take it out on someone.”

Still silence behind him. He wondered if the silence was going to be his answer, so he turned around. Bruce was lying there, arms folded behind his head, just watching him. His face was just Bruce’s. “Bruce,” Hal said softly. “Whatever the fuck is going on with Parallax, it can’t be here. I won’t bring that here. Not to your house.”

Bruce looked at the ceiling, apparently wrapped in thought. “How much cred do I have,” he said after a while. 

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how much would you be willing to do a thing, simply because I’m the one asking you to do it? If it were no other reason than because I was asking it, would you do it? Even if it were against your better judgment, even if it were something you didn’t want to do? But if it were because of me. Would you do it then?”

“Yes,” Hal said.

“Then I’m cashing in every chip I have, and asking you not to go.”

“Is that a strategic decision, or something else?”

“Does that matter to you?”

“I don’t know. But I’m thinking it should matter to you.”

Bruce got up on the other side of the bed, and walked around to where Hal was sitting. He did let himself look then, because there was firelight, and Bruce walking around naked, and it was one of the most beautiful sights he had ever seen, all that warm light and shadow on Bruce’s body. Bruce knelt and started to undo his brace for him, gently. He rested a hand on his quad. 

“Want me to?” he said, and Hal nodded. He shut his eyes while Bruce’s fingers dug in, and he let those hands gouge out all the poison Parallax had lodged in his body. He leaned back, let his head fall back. 

“So Clark is getting married,” he murmured. “Wait. Did he ask you to be his best man?”

“He did, in fact.”

“Guess you better start working on your speech, then.”

“I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea. Associating himself publicly with Bruce Wayne would be the worst sort of—”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, you are shitting me. You did not cite security reasons for explaining why you were turning the man down, tell me you didn’t do that.”

Bruce smiled, and started a long slow rub up the middle of the muscle. “I didn’t turn him down,” he said. “I just told him it was a bad idea. But since I am best man, this means I am going to be in charge of some of the social arrangements, such as—”

“Such as the bachelor party,” Hal said. “Oh my Christ, really? He put you of all people in charge of that? Oh no wait, it’ll be fine. Clark will love it. You’ll probably plan a book swap or something, and Clark will think it’s the best party he’s ever been to in his whole life. Maybe we can have cocoa, and wear our pajamas."

“Your idea would of course be strippers.”

“My idea would be something where people had some actual fun, and not—” He winced, and Bruce’s fingers stopped. 

“Too hard?”

“A little.”

Bruce resumed, gentler now. “Well,” he said after a pause. “I was actually thinking, something that split the difference between a booty call and a book club. Like a weekend on a South Pacific island with his closest friends, maybe.”

“I take it back, you are exactly the person to put in charge of this party. You’re giving him an island?”

“I’m not _giving_ him an island, I’m loaning it for the weekend.”

“And what, flying the strippers to the south Pacific?”

“You have a fixation.”

“I like naked people.” Hal leaned all the way back on the bed now, and let himself go limp. Bruce was alternating between his quads now. “Sorry I called Clark boring,” he said. 

“Now you’re just hoping you get invited to the weekend on the island.”

“Wait, was there a possibility I was not going to be invited?”

“You didn’t even know he wasn’t married until earlier this evening. Arguably ‘closest friends’ might be stretching it to include you.”

“Okay, but if that’s the criterion, that’s what, you and his parents?”

“Literally the second thing out of your mouth after apologizing for calling him boring, is to call him boring.”

“I don’t think Clark is boring! I don’t, I swear. I just think. . . I dunno. He’s like that guy in high school that nothing bad ever happened to, you know?”

Bruce paused in his work, and looked up. “Nothing bad,” he said.

“Yeah yeah, planet blows up, parents die, whatever, it’s all before he even knows about it, and he grows up with this really nice, really fucking _normal_ family, with these really supportive parents, and he has a great job and a great girlfriend, and is also ridiculously fucking attractive with oh, wait for it, more power than any person on the face of the planet ever, so yeah, excuse me for being mildly and occasionally resentful. And you have totally stopped massaging me, so I’m guessing I just made it worse, huh.”

He raised his head to see Bruce looking at him thoughtfully. “Hal,” he said. “Do you want more power than any person on the face of the planet?”

“I mean it’s not the worst thing that ever happened to anyone, is all I’m saying.”

“Every death because of natural disaster or accident or violence that happens on this planet, in the blink of every second, he could prevent. Do you understand what that means? Do you want the choice of who to save, and who to let die? Do you want to speculate, every night before you go to sleep, how many people will die before you wake up, and whose deaths you could have prevented?”

Hal stared at the ceiling. “Well when you put it that way.”

“You and I made a choice. You could have rejected the ring, and the responsibilities that came with it. I certainly chose what I do. But Clark was never given a choice, and yet he has embraced the responsibility. It’s a hell of a life. But you sit there and say nothing bad has ever happened to him.”

“Okay,” Hal said.

“Okay, is your response?”

“What the fuck do you want me to say? You win, I was wrong, Clark is perfect forever. So why don’t I just lie here and listen to you suck Clark’s noble cock some more, and I’ll shut the hell up.”

Bruce rose. He was still naked. How could someone do that, just carry on a whole conversation without any clothes on like that? But Bruce didn’t look like it bothered him. He was looking down at Hal, who struggled to sit up. “Let me guess,” he sighed. “This is the part where I get the hell out.”

“That leg doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere tonight.”

“It’s fine,” Hal growled, reaching for his brace. But Bruce’s hands met his, took the brace gently from him. 

“Hal,” he said. 

“I keep fucking up,” Hal said. “Fuck. I don’t know what I’m saying. Don’t listen to me.”

“You forget, I have long practice in not listening to anything you say. Come on, lie back down.” And Bruce was on the bed beside him, pulling him down with him onto the vast bed. He let Bruce tug his clothes off, piece by piece, which was probably not sexytimes but just Bruce’s weirdness about having clothes in the bed. They lay there in silence, more or less draped across each other, and after a while Bruce’s fingers began a slow weave through Hal’s hair. He still hadn’t gotten it cut. He had meant to do that. 

“I’m so fucking tired,” Hal said, letting his eyes close.

“I know,” Bruce murmured.

“So where is this island?”

“It’s just a little atoll. I bought it a few years ago.”

“Just a little atoll, he says.”

“I was also thinking. . . I was thinking that the warmth would do you good, even if it’s just a few days. This cold is shredding your muscles.”

“So I do get to go.”

“If you can control that mouth of yours for five seconds.”

Hal gave a sleepy smile. “Do you say lines like that because you know I’m gonna make it something dirty?”

“Yes.”

“C’mere.”

Bruce shifted, and Hal scooted up a bit, and they were kissing, just quietly. Things were getting a bit more intentional when a thought struck Hal, and he lifted his head. “Hey, do we need to. . . I mean, is it okay for me to be here? ‘Cause of. . . Damian, and Alfred, and. . . whoever.”

“It’s fine,” Bruce said. 

“Okay.” Hal shifted them so he was on top, which he knew Bruce liked. It occurred to him Bruce would probably love it if he used the ring on him in bed. But he wasn’t going to. They just kept up a slow grind, and his orgasm when it came was rich and deep and cathartic, and he could imagine that all Parallax’s poison was draining out of him, all of it seeping out him like hot light and onto the warm planes of Bruce’s body pressed against his.

He liked how, when he came, Bruce would get a fistful of Hal’s hair in his fingers and yank his neck back, press his mouth to Hal’s jaw. Bruce was pretty silent in bed, which Hal appreciated as a general rule, but when he came he would do this thing – make this soft noise, low in his throat, an exhalation really, more than a sound, and it was so fucking hot it always made Hal want to come again, if he had already. And if he hadn’t come? Then Bruce’s small breath of a groan would make his balls tighten and his cock spill, make him just fucking lose it. 

He got his mouth back on Bruce’s, kissing him hard and sloppy. “Why are you so fucking hot,” he murmured. Bruce’s answer was in the slide of his tongue against Hal’s. 

Afterward Hal was the one to lie there awake. His head was on Bruce’s chest, Bruce’s hand heavy on his back. It was okay, his sleep was pretty messed up, and he had been sleeping so much during the days that he would sometimes lie awake till all hours, somewhere between sleep and waking.

So he might have dreamed it, when his eyes flicked open and he saw Parallax – saw himself, the sick yellow mirror of himself, dressed in the Lantern uniform – leaning against the back of the sofa, watching them.

Hal stared wordlessly. Parallax stared back. He gave a slow smile. “Pet,” he mouthed. And then, for the barest second – maybe he imagined it, or maybe it was a trick of the light – but for a flicker of an instant, Parallax’s eyes slid to Bruce’s sleeping form, and rested there. There was something hungry in his eyes. 

“ _NO!_ ” Hal hissed, and with all the considerable force in his arm he hurled a green scimitar across the room, slicing the creature in half, shattering him in a burst of green light. Bruce’s eyes fluttered open, then shut again. 

“Go to sleep,” Hal whispered, quickly killing the construct and settling in beside him. But he kept a protective hand on Bruce’s shoulder, and he stayed awake until dawn. 

Watching.

* * *

“Okay, so wait wait wait,” Ollie was saying, and he was laughing so hard Hal was worried for his ability to breathe. “You’re telling me this is real? You are not shitting me?”

“No, so, okay, you have to keep in mind this was in forensics,” Barry said, but he was laughing too. “I mean, I thought if I went on a date with an assistant coroner we would have lots to talk about, you know?”

“But this is pre-Iris,” Clark interjected, passing the bottle of wine his direction.

“Oh totally. Well, this is deep in my denial phase, where I was convinced that if I just dated enough women I would forget about being in love with Iris, and it would be fine. So I asked Karen out—”

“Wait, have I met her?” Hal said, leaning forward. “This isn’t Karen from your lab, is it?”

“No, that’s Carolyn, completely different, and also about sixty-five years old, what even is wrong with you?”

“Hey, I don’t judge!”

“ _Anyway_ ,” Barry resumed, “so I thought going out with Karen would be a great idea, and dinner was amazing, and I was right, we had so much in common, and by the time the check comes I’m thinking, oh man, this is perfect, she’s great, this is the answer to forgetting about Iris, right? But then as we’re heading to the car she asks if we can stop off at the office, and I’m thinking, oh, maybe she must have left something, no big. And then once we get to the labs she asks me to come in with her, and then she asks me down to the morgue, and this is where we fast forward to me having sex in the morgue on one of the sliding gurneys.”

“Good sex?” Clark said.

“Well, metal is very cold, and honestly I spent most of it trying to keep her underneath me so I didn’t have to be in contact with the table, because I will be honest she did not seem to mind the whole metal thing, and let’s just say it rapidly became apparent this was not so much a one-off fantasy for her as a regular feature of her sex life.”

“Were there dead bodies down there?” Hal grabbed the wine bottle as it made its way back around and poured himself another glass. 

“I mean, presumably? I did not check the other drawers, but it’s a pretty good bet there were. Mainly it was just cold as fuck in there, and the whole time I’m thinking _I can do this, this is fine, this is what fun adventurous sexy people do_ , but it wasn’t fine, and the gurney was really cold, and she was just. . . she was way into it.”

“No no wait, come on,” Ollie. “ _That’s_ the worst date of your life, are you fucking kidding me? Because you got laid at the end of it.”

“Did you miss the part where it was in a morgue?”

“So?? Bad pizza is still pizza.”

“Yeah I’m with Ol on this one Barry. Worst date would be, she locks you in one of the sliding drawers,” Hal said.

“ _Before_ sex,” Oliver said.

“Right, because I think we’ve established Ollie’s criterion of a successful date,” Hal laughed.

“Okay, fine,” Barry said. “Let’s see what Clark’s got then. Come on big guy, worst date of your entire life.”

“All right, give me a minute to think,” Clark said, and he tilted his chair so he was staring up at the thick blanket of stars overhead. They were sitting out on the patio, and it was strung with lights, but even so, the stars out here were so thick and close they were almost brighter than the lights. There was a warm breeze that blew from the ocean every few minutes, ruffling Bruce’s hair as he sat there on the edge of the circle listening to them. His eyes skated briefly to Hal’s, and Hal gave a little grin, and Bruce’s answering twitch of a smile warmed him better than the wine. 

They had flown in this morning, and while everyone had been getting settled in the house – and what did it say other than Hal had been spending too much time at the Manor, soaking up the billionaire lifestyle, that he had arrived on a private island with a luxurious glass-walled villa and thought, _yeah, this is fine, it’s not bad_ – but while everyone had been getting settled in their rooms, Hal had found Bruce out on the veranda, leaning against a pillar of the porch and looking out at the view. 

“Not a bad place,” he said. 

“It isn’t at that,” Bruce said. “I ought to come out here more often.”

“Clark’s pretty excited. He’s in there doing everything but bouncing on the bed. I’d check your stock of complimentary shampoos and lotions, he’s probably in there right now raking them into his bag.”

“Is this more of your bitching at Clark?”

“No.” Hal came and leaned on the pillar opposite his, enjoying the view of Bruce while Bruce was enjoying his view of the ocean. “What I was trying to say was, you’re a good friend. This is an awesome thing to do.”

Bruce cocked his head at Hal. “Well,” he said. “I get a pretty nice vacation out of it too.”

“Mm hmm. Because you’re such a regular vacation kind of guy.” But he said it with a slow smile. He wondered if they looked normal – if Ollie opened the glass doors onto the porch, would it look like just two guys leaning on the porch talking? 

“So,” Hal said. “If I happen to leave my door unlocked when we go to bed, any chance of some room service later on tonight?”

“Mmm. Someone to leave a mint on your pillow, fluff your towels, that sort of thing?”

“I guess that would depend on how thick the walls are in this house.”

“Well,” Bruce said, considering. “I bought the house, I didn’t build it, so it’s not quite to the specifications I would have insisted on. The walls aren’t lead-lined, for one thing.”

“I’m okay with that.”

“Are you now,” Bruce said. If someone were watching them, they probably looked stranger than they had before, the intent way they were looking at each other. It wasn’t something they had talked about, not really. By common consent what was going on between them was for them alone, and not for anyone else, and Hal liked it that way. He didn’t need to be having conversations that were no one else’s business anyway. 

“Anyway,” Bruce said. “My only point is, privacy might be a little harder to come by than at home.”

Hal looked out at the ocean. Bruce did that a lot, actually – casually said “home” when he was talking about the place where they lived, as though the Manor included the carriage house. As though “home” was for them the same place; as though it were a shared home. It gave Hal the same warm tightness in his chest that it had the first time he had heard Bruce say that word. 

“So your idea is,” Hal said, “that we be celibate for the weekend.”

“It is just a weekend.”

Hal gave a long slow grin. “You and me,” he said. “Keeping our hands off each other for forty-eight hours. Oh yeah, shouldn’t be a problem at all.”

Bruce gave an answering smile. “Maybe I just have greater faith in us than you do.”

“Us? Oh I don’t think I’m the problem here. I’ve got ten bucks that says you crack in less than five hours.”

“Oh is that so. Put your money where your mouth is, Jordan.”

“Is that more bait for a mouth joke?”

“Naturally.”

“Okay, just checking.”

But something about the idea that they _weren’t_ going to touch this weekend, made every inch of Hal’s skin itch to touch Bruce. Of course, after telling Bruce he would be the first one to crack, he couldn’t let on, but still. It was funny what it did to him – just sitting out here warmed by the ocean breeze, under the soft glow of the patio lights, the wine flowing freely – funny what it did to look over and see Bruce’s eyes on him, just resting there, and to meet those eyes and know that Bruce could read everything he was thinking. To know that every time their eyes brushed, there was a whole private world in there. Like all the talk and the laughter and the wine, that was the warm water at the surface of the ocean, but all the while his feet were plunged in this colder, deeper current running underneath, this current that was just for him. 

“All right, I’ve got it,” Clark announced, setting his wine glass down. “Worst date of my entire life. My senior prom.”

“Ehhhh,” Ollie said skeptically. “I don’t know that a high school date can count as a worst date. Hardly anyone is having sex in high school anyway.”

“Well, I actually had a lot of sex in high school,” Hal said, and Bruce’s eyes flicked to him, and Hal buried his smile in his wine, because he knew Bruce was thinking about the captain of the football team. 

“Yeah yeah, we all know you were the king of high school,” Barry said, but Clark waved his hand. 

“I wasn’t finished,” he said. “Just wait. So this is my senior prom, and I’ve finally got Lana to go out with me. This night is my big chance. Only. . . only I’m still not very good at controlling my strength, particularly in situations where I’m a little nervous. And because I know that, I tend to overcompensate. So after I take her to dinner, we go to get back in the car, and there’s a good five minutes where I’m struggling to open the car door for her.”

“Struggling to open it?” Hal said.

“Right, because I was nervous, and all I could think was, okay, use just the right amount of force to open the door like a normal person, do not rip the car door off its hinges, just be _normal_ dammit. Only I was so nervous I forgot exactly what the right amount of force was, and I was being too gentle, and so my date was treated to the edifying spectacle of me wrestling for five minutes with her car door like a lunatic as I attempted to open it for her. But it was fine, I pretended it had a tendency to stick, no worries, I get it open. And then I close it behind her, and. . . and I close it too hard, and it collapses into the door frame. Like, it’s crushed into the frame of the car, it looks like we got t-boned by a semi.”

Hal thought of what Bruce had said, about Clark’s life and not being able to choose. For better or worse, none of the people sitting at this table had had to wrestle with superpowers at their high school prom. 

“But it’s fine,” Clark continued, “because Lana doesn’t really notice, since as I discover later in the evening, every time Lana has been going to the bathroom, which was a lot, she was drinking from her hip flask of vodka, so it’s fair to say that at this point we could actually have been t-boned by a semi and she would not have noticed. But I was oblivious, mainly because girls were things I had read about on the internet, or the portions of the internet not controlled by my parent’s net nanny, so I thought all women went to the bathroom every four minutes. Anyway, the whole drive to the dance, I’m frantically thinking, how do I get her out of this car? Because the door is not going to open, that is for sure. What the hell do I do?”

“You try to get her out your side of the car,” Hal said. “Only let me guess, she’s drunk, and as you’re pulling her toward your side she thinks you are making your smooth move, which she is more than cool with, and she crawls on top of you and this is the story of how you had sex in the parking lot at your senior prom and never actually made it to the dance.”

“That’s. . .” Clark stared at him. “Have I told this story before?” Bruce laughed softly, and Oliver slapped the table until the plates rattled.

“How the fuck do you people keep thinking having sex is _ever_ a bad date? What the fuck is wrong with all of you?”

“Okay, but does it count as a bad date if your high school gym teacher catches you having sex at the prom in your car? And when he knocks on the car window, you’re so freaked out that as you’re trying to sit up you forget about the whole ‘appropriate amount of force’ thing and put your foot through the car door while you’re attempting to get out of the car and also, please God, zip your fly at the same time? Would that count then?”

“Wait, you put your foot through the door?” Barry said. 

“And then, because high school me is an idiot, I tried to pretend like it _wasn’t happening_ , so I am following Coach Rinehart into the gym while dragging the car door with me. On my leg. Attached to me. Because in my head, that was the way to make it all fine, was to pretend normal people dragged car doors attached to their leg through a parking lot. So that was a thing that happened.”

Bruce threw back his head and laughed, and Oliver did too, his bray of a laugh riding over Bruce’s. “And I can still remember,” Clark said, wiping at his face and laughing too, now, “I swear to God I can still remember Coach Rinehart’s face as he turned around and saw me dragging a literal goddamn car door along with me, and he shouted ‘Good God Kent what happened?’ and the only thing I could think to say was, ‘car crash, sir.’ That. . . that was the literal best my brain could do.”

“But you still had _some_ sex,” Oliver said.

“Oliver, you have a one-track mind,” Barry said.

“Not so, not so, I am also capable of caring a great deal about liquor, which brings me to the point of noticing that Bruce has yet to bring out the hard stuff, and I can’t help but feel he’s holding out on us here. What’s the word, Bruce, you got any scotch in your liquor pantry there? Or do we need to send Barry on a quick run to the mainland for some actual hooch?”

“Oh I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Barry said, stretching out his long legs. “I am a little too drunk to be running across the Pacific Ocean right now.”

“What? On _wine_? Hal, your boy is a fucking lightweight, what the hell is the matter with him?”

“All right,” Bruce said, getting up. “I’m going to go see what we’ve got in stock. Hal, come with me and help me carry.”

Hal leaped up. “Sure thing,” he said, because he had read the quick slide of Bruce’s eyes, and fuck yes, he was up for a fast grope in the pantry, and maybe if they were quick about it, a hell of a lot more than a grope, and—

“Nah, sit down, I got this,” Oliver said, landing a heavy hand on Hal’s shoulder and pressing him back into his chair. “I want a say in what we’re gonna line up here, can’t have old cheapskate Bruce trying to cheat us out of the good stuff. Besides, your taste in liquor is for shit, Hall-e-o, no offense.”

Bruce’s gaze at Oliver was murderous, but Oliver clapped a hand on his back and pushed past him in the doorway. “All right let’s see what you got!” he called, in a voice that reverberated through the house, and Clark started quietly laughing. 

“You have something you want to say about my taste in liquor too?” Hal said.

“Oh, that’s not why I’m laughing,” Clark said, and emptied the last of the wine bottle into Barry’s glass.

* * *

Hal lay sprawled on the guest room bed, listening to the ocean. He was still pleasantly buzzed, and the warmth of the island had seeped into all his muscles.

He had thought it would be weird, to be hanging out with everybody again, but it wasn’t. It was like nothing had changed. And it just brought home to him how hard he had shut everyone out in the last few months. He couldn’t remember why he had done that. He didn’t actually remember doing it – it was just, his life had narrowed, in the way that sick people’s lives did.

Maybe that was the problem – he kept thinking of himself as sick, when he wasn’t, not really. He was just who he was now, the version of Hal who had Marchand’s. It wasn’t the flu, or something he was going to get over. It was just him. Which was either the most liberating thing he had realized in the last year, or the most fucking depressing. Or maybe equal servings of both. 

After the scotch had arrived from the liquor pantry, the evening had become kind of a blur. But at some point they had been back in the house, and Hal had been on the sofa, and Barry had been telling this incredibly rambling story that at some point everyone had quietly agreed not to listen to, and Clark had leaned over into Hal’s space. 

“I’m really glad you came,” he had said, quietly. 

“Yeah,” Hal said. “Me too.” And Clark had reached over and squeezed his shoulder, and then he had turned and was trying to talk Barry through the end of his story, because that was the sort of helpful thing Clark did. Clark was actually an incredibly nice guy, and he had been an asshole before. Besides, he had too much scotch in him to see the hard edges of the universe anymore. 

The best part of the evening had been the toasts. Oliver had decided at some point that since Bruce would get to toast Clark at his wedding, they should all get to come up with their own toasts now, which went about as well as drunk toasts generally went. But Barry’s had actually been the best one, and the nicest. He had talked about Lois, and how great she was, and Hal had watched Clark, and seen the way all the lines in Clark’s face softened whenever anyone said Lois’s name.

Barry had at last lifted his glass – he was standing on the table at this point – and said, “To Clark and Lois: the match of the century!” and everyone had yelled and clapped, and Clark’s smile had been a quiet one. And for some reason it had hit him that Clark actually _loved_ Lois, and it wasn’t just the sort of ‘well we’ve been together forever so might as well get married’ kind of thing that he assumed most weddings were. Or maybe. . . maybe he had just assumed those things, because heterosexuality had never been an awesomely comfortable fit for him, and he had thought it was the exact same for everybody else as it was for him, when it really really was not. 

Bruce had called him a galloping narcissist, and he had thought that was unfair. Possibly it wasn’t. He closed his eyes and tried to sleep, but the room was still spinning a bit, and the warmth of the evening still buzzing in his veins. 

His bedroom door creaked slightly, and Bruce slipped inside. He was shirtless, wearing pajama bottoms. He stood there leaning against the door. Hal flipped back the blankets, and Bruce crawled inside.

“I thought we were worried about being caught,” Hal whispered, wrapping his arms around Bruce. 

“How quiet can you be,” Bruce whispered back, his voice a breath of sound.

They had fucked a lot in the last few weeks, and it had been some A-plus fucking, probably the best in his life, but somehow none of it was as good as this, when they had to be as still and as quiet as possible. They made hardly any noise at all. They left their pajamas on, untying them only a little. Their movements were controlled, deliberate. Hal came so hard he arched his neck until it felt like it was going to snap, until his whole body shook and shook. 

Bruce’s mouth found his ear again. “You have a kink,” he murmured, and Hal shook again, soaking his pants and Bruce’s. 

Afterward their kisses were more hungry than before. Hal’s sleep was deep and dreamless, the peace of the island as heavy on his bones as the warmth of the air, as Bruce’s arm flung across him, anchoring him.


	13. Chapter 13

He woke to sunlight and agony. A knife of pain stabbed him straight up his spine, and he woke with a gasp for air. It wasn’t just one quad, it was both of them, and it was shooting up into his hips – the pain of the spasm thrashed and convulsed him, and he knew he cried out. A hand reached for his arm, grabbed him.

“Hal,” Bruce murmured beside him.

“It’s—I can’t—" He flung off Bruce’s hand.

“Hold on, hang on,” Bruce was saying, instantly awake, and he was grabbing at Hal’s leg, trying to press against the merciless knotting that would not relent, that wrung Hal’s lungs and left him gasping and writhing.

“No, it’s—leave it, it won’t— _fuck!_ ” 

And then the spasm was over as quickly as it had begun, and Hal pushed him away, staggered up from the bed, his legs stiff as boards beneath him, and he made it halfway to the bathroom before he fell, but he struggled up and made it the next few feet, which was all he needed. He fell over the toilet and began heaving the entire contents of his stomach into it, shaking with the convulsions of it. 

He hung there over the rim of the toilet, limp. It was his own fault – his own fucking fault. He had wanted to be normal, yesterday. He had wanted one day that was like before, just one fucking day. Was that really so much to ask of the universe? Could he not have one day where things were like they were before, when he could just be Hal Jordan again?

And so he had overloaded on his meds. He had thought that would take care of it. What could it hurt, just for the one day? How big a deal could it possibly be?

“Fuck,” he said weakly, as another round of spasms took him. There wasn’t anything left in his stomach, just bile. Dimly he was aware that there was a cool rag on his face, wiping it, and a cool glass of water pressed to his mouth. He drank, and retched again. He tipped his head back against the cool tile of the bathroom wall and closed his eyes. 

When he opened his eyes Bruce was sitting on the floor opposite him, and they just sat there for a minute, looking at each other. The morning sun was streaming across the bedroom, and the white curtains floated with the breeze. It must be early yet. He had woken Bruce from a sound sleep. Hal felt like there was sunlight in his head for the first time in a while, and clarity. 

“What the fuck are you doing,” Hal croaked. 

“Sitting here with you.”

“No. I mean, what the fuck are you doing. This whole stupid. . . fucking thing. It needs. . . it needs to stop.”

“What exactly do you—”

“Stop,” Hal said harshly. “Just fucking stop. This has been great, you have been great, this has been quite the ride, but we are done. We are so fucking done, because this ends in one place and you and I both know what that place is, and if you were lying to yourself before you sure as fuck can’t do it now. I end in a fucking wheelchair, all right, and that’s sooner rather than later, so we are fucking done here. Just get the fuck away from me.”

Bruce just sat there, leaning against the wall. There was a washcloth on the edge of the bathtub beside him, and he folded it carefully. He looked out at the curtains fluttering in the breeze, at the wreck Hal had made of the sheets when he had staggered across the room. He looked thoughtful. 

“Do you love me,” he said. 

“I—what does that—”

“It’s a simple question, but it’s not a question with a right answer. It’s fine if you don’t. It’s not some sort of requirement for fucking me. I was just curious.”

Hal stared at him. “Yeah,” he said. “I love you. What the fuck did you think?”

Bruce tossed the washcloth in the bathtub. “I don’t know, Hal. What exactly was I supposed to think? You let me in, but never all the way, not really. You’re happy to fuck around, but you sure as hell don’t want to talk about it, and you’d sooner eat nails than touch me in public. So it’s a fair question I think.” 

He wished he could do something other than sit there and stare at Bruce. That. . . _that_ was what Bruce thought? It was like before, when he had watched the movie of his life, but suddenly seen from a different angle, and just like that, _click click click_ , he saw himself as Bruce would see him. Everything Bruce was saying was true, and he hadn’t even realized it. Of course Bruce had to wonder what the hell was going on, because Hal himself hadn’t known – hadn’t known until Bruce had said the word. Hadn’t even known there was a word. 

“I love you,” Hal said. “Listen to me, I fucking suck at this. I’ve never done anything like this before, and no, I do not mean fucked around with a guy and meant it. I mean this is shit I’ve never felt before, with anyone, and I thought I knew what that word meant, but I didn’t, because this is—this is so far off the map I don’t even know where I am. I don’t have words for it. All the words I know suck. But yeah, I fucking love you. Love isn’t even the word. You. . . you make me breathe right. I didn’t even know I wasn’t breathing, before. Of course I love you, you idiot.”

“When will you stop?”

“I. . . when will I _stop?_ What the fuck kind of question is that? I’m not gonna stop, not ever. You think you can stop breathing?”

Bruce moved then. Crawled over and put himself in Hal’s space, right in front of him. Grabbed hold of Hal’s head, held it. “Then why the hell,” he said quietly, “do you think it’s any different for me?”

Hal blinked. “Oh,” he said. 

“Oh, is what you have to say?”

“Yeah. Oh.” And he reached up so his hands were on Bruce’s face too. So that was the movie they were in. He didn’t know the script, didn’t know anything that was supposed to happen here. It was unsettling, exhilarating. They could just make everything up, make it the way they wanted it. He pulled Bruce’s head to his so they were resting forehead to forehead. He liked that. 

Bruce shifted and resettled so he was leaning against the wall next to Hal, and Hal let himself rest against the pillow of Bruce’s shoulder. “Fuck,” he sighed. “I can’t believe I fucked up this weekend.”

“No you didn’t.”

“I’m gonna have to spend the day in bed, probably. And then. . . everyone will know and feel sorry for me, and Clark’s weekend will be all fucked up.”

Bruce’s mouth brushed against the top of his head. “And if no one even notices?” he asked. “Is that the best case scenario as far as you’re concerned, or the worst?” 

Hal sighed. He let himself drift there, resting against Bruce. He was drained from the agony of the spasms, and then all the vomiting, and then the things they had said. “Why don’t I just fly back,” he said, after a while. “I could make up something.”

“Please stay.”

“You want me to?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

There was another kiss on the top of his head, and then Bruce was gently shifting, extricating himself and standing up. “I’m going to make you some tea and toast,” he said. “You need something to settle your stomach.”

“I’ve never actually seen you cook something.”

“How hard could it really be?”

“Oh God no, please, I can make myself something, just—”

Bruce was shutting the bathroom door behind him, and Hal sighed. So much for Marchand’s being the non-terminal kind of muscular dystrophy, because Bruce was heading to a kitchen to fix him something, and he was surely gonna die.

* * *

Bruce shut the door of Hal’s room quietly behind him. The house was wrapped in stillness, and likely would be for some time; the party had gone on until at least three in the morning, long after Bruce himself had gone to bed. 

He padded down the hallway to the wide glass-fronted main rooms of the house, where you could just see a glimpse of the ocean and the sun glinting off the lagoon. Clark was awake, of course – he hadn’t fooled himself Clark had slept through any of that this morning. He was leaning against the kitchen counter nursing a coffee, and he wordlessly handed Bruce a steaming mug. Not quite as black as Bruce would have made it, but it was adequate, and Bruce drank it down gratefully.

“How is he?” Clark said. His eyes were grave. 

“Better.” He dug around in a promising cabinet, hoping to find bread. No bread there. He opened another cupboard. This place had been fully stocked, but God and Alfred only knew where things actually were. 

“What are you looking for?”

“Bread. I thought some toast, maybe.”

“I’ll get it. You drink your coffee.” Clark pulled out a plate and set to work, and for once Bruce did not object. 

“Does that happen a lot?” Clark asked. “The spasms waking him up, I mean.”

Bruce shook his head. “No.”

“So. . . are things getting worse?”

“There are good days and bad,” he said, and he thought of Hal sitting in the park with him that day, and how Hal had said the exact same thing to him. It was what someone who lived inside chronic illness said to someone on the outside of it, because what else was there to say? His heart had been wrung for Hal that day, for his quiet matter-of-factness. For what it had cost him to sit on that bench and tell him things he hadn’t told anyone else. 

Clark was fussing with the toast and butter, making a plate. Bruce hunted in the refrigerator for some jam – he could appeal to Hal’s sweet tooth to get some food in him. He needed to eat before he took his meds, and he needed those meds to make sure there were no more spasms today, because he didn’t think Hal could take another round of that. It was the first time he had seen Hal writhing in pain like that, and it had gutted him. 

“Raspberry,” he said, emerging with a jar and setting it on the counter beside Clark. He considered the orange juice, but he didn’t need anything too acidic in his stomach. He needed tea. Was there a kettle somewhere? There was bound to be. 

“You know,” Clark said, “I figured something was wrong with you. Recently you’ve been just. . . different, somehow. I couldn’t really put my finger on it.”

“Mmm,” Bruce grunted, because he could see where this was going. Clark’s conversational gambits were never what you would call subtle. 

“But then, this weekend, I figured it out. I guess I’m just not used to seeing you. . . happy.”

Bruce looked up, because that he had not been expecting. Clark was just looking at him. “Me neither,” Bruce said. Clark grinned at him, and he smiled back. Clark’s joy had a tendency to be infectious. 

“So being in the closet this weekend – please tell me that’s not because of me.”

“It’s not. But there’s time enough for those conversations, and our business is our business. A weekend on the QT seemed like the thing to do. Hal’s more private than you would think, and the truth is. . . truth is, he’s not all that used to being out, anyway.”

“Uh huh. And your experience of being out would be what, exactly?”

“Well I read this book once,” he said, and Clark laughed. 

“You know,” Clark said, “when Barry was toasting us last night, and he said that about the match of the century, I couldn’t help but think – I thought, that’s really nice, but I know who the match of the century is.”

“You’re a hopeless sentimentalist,” Bruce said, pouring the water for the tea. 

“Yeah well, the jig is up my friend. You don’t get to pretend you’re not one too, not after I saw you last night. Hal walks into a room and little pink hearts practically float from your eyes.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Here, put the toast on this,” he said, because he had finally located a tray. “Sugar?”

Clark dug in the cabinets some more, and returned with a bowl of sugar cubes. “What can I do?” he said.

“It’s just a tray, I think I’ve got it handled.”

“No, I meant. . . what can I do.”

Bruce considered. “Are you honestly asking?”

“I’m honestly asking.”

“Give him a call sometime. See if he wants to go do something. He’s shut out Barry and Oliver completely, not that they made much of an effort to begin with. He needs to do more than shuffle around the Manor and read increasingly strange books in the library, and he needs a better friend than a twelve-year-old.”

“I think he’s got a pretty good friend,” Clark said.

Bruce busied himself with the tea to avoid looking at Clark. He kept his head down because he knew that it would be written across his face, the memory of this morning and Hal’s voice when he had said . . what he had said. The way his eyes had held Bruce’s and not flinched. 

Sometimes when Hal would sleep, Bruce would lie there and try to talk himself out of it. _He’s not himself,_ he would say. _He’s sick and exhausted and in need of distraction from the ruination of his life, and you’re an adequate distraction. Stop making it more than that. Stop waiting for him to say words he’ll never say. Stop hoping. Stop leaning into every caress like a touch-starved cat._

But he couldn’t help it. 

He hadn’t meant to start sleeping with Hal, hadn’t meant for any of this to happen. Had never intended to allow anyone, ever again, to get that close to him. Hal Jordan had seemed like the opposite of a problem – surprisingly easy to be around, pleasant company, a seamless fit into the Manor. Attractive, certainly, but then Bruce was aware of his own sex drive, and knew how to control it. Not until the night it had become clear to him that Hal was as drawn to him as he was to Hal, not until then, had he let himself. 

_There are lots of reasons this is not a great idea,_ Hal had said, and Bruce hadn’t pressed the point, hadn’t said, _define ‘this,’_ because he hadn’t wanted to hear what words Hal would use. 

“Hey you’ve got a boat down at the lagoon, right?”

“Should be, yes.”

“Well why don’t I lead an expedition today. Take Ollie and Barry on a boat trip, give Hal some space to rest without the whole house breathing down his neck.”

“That. . . might be an excellent idea. I’ll see what he says. And Clark.”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.” Clark gave a slow smile, the kind that made his kind, open face and made it even kinder and more open. Clark would know he was thanking him for more than just a boat trip.

“Anytime,” Clark said. 

He carried the tray down the hall and nudged open the bedroom door. Hal was still in the bathroom, but he was at the sink, cleaning himself, splashing water on his hair. He had put his brace on. 

“Here, get something in you before you take more meds,” Bruce said, and Hal grimaced at the food, then looked again. 

“Wait. . . did you make me toast with raspberry jam?”

“I did.”

“I love raspberry jam.”

“A fact which evidently did not escape Alfred’s notice, when he stocked the house.”

Hal took a tentative bite of the toast. “I can’t believe you made me toast,” he said, munching meditatively. “Is that the first thing you’ve cooked in your whole life?”

“Clark made it.”

“Of course you had wifey make my breakfast.” 

“Shove it up your ass, Jordan.” But he said it with a smirk, leaning against the doorframe, and Hal kept on with his toast. He was still in the sweatpants he had slept in – as far as he had been able to tell the man did not own actual pajamas – and no shirt, and it was certainly a nice view. But he could see the exhaustion around his eyes. 

Hal set the toast down and took a sip of the tea. “Sorry about this morning,” he said. 

“I was up anyway.”

“Liar.”

“Also sorry about. . . you know.”

“Having emotions?”

Hal narrowed his eyes at him. “You do know why that’s fucking hilarious coming from you, right?”

“I do.”

Hal put the tea down. Bruce noticed he was very interested in the tea. Or at least, very interested in not meeting Bruce’s eyes. He finished washing up, and headed to the bedroom, or tired to – he was unsteady on his feet, and Bruce got an arm around him, and to his surprise he didn’t meet resistance. Hal just leaned on him and let himself be led back to the bed. He thought of that first day in the park, where to his surprise Hal had accepted an arm to lean on, and he wondered if it was as simple as that, everything between them – if it had all been built on one simple act of trust offered, and received. 

Hal was settling back under the covers, and his eyes were drifting shut. Bruce lay beside him, and Hal turned into him, and they held each other for a while. _Of course I love you, you idiot,_ Hal had said. Bruce let his eyes slide shut, and let the sweetness of that knock in his chest for a minute. 

“Clark had an idea,” Bruce said quietly.

“Mm.”

“He was thinking about taking the boat out. Taking everybody with him, give you some time to rest.”

Hal’s eyes opened. “Because he heard me,” he said. 

“He did.”

“Fuck I hate everything,” Hal moaned, and rolled the other direction. 

“Clark doesn’t care. He just wants to help.”

“Yeah, I know,” Hal sighed. “Still. A boat trip, huh? Ollie drank so much he’s still going to be drunk when he wakes up. Clark’s gonna have to fish him out of the lagoon before he’s shark bait.”

“It might give us some peace and quiet in the house.”

Hal sighed again. He rolled back over and reached for Bruce’s hand. “Is there any way. . . would it piss you off if I ask you to go with them too?”

“No,” Bruce said. He wondered how much of that was Hal’s desire to be alone, and how much was Hal’s desire not to make Bruce look like his caretaker in front of Barry and Oliver. Or more than his caretaker. “But I don’t promise not to fake seasickness and lock myself in the hold.”

“Fair.” Hal lifted his hand and kissed it. It was a more tender gesture than he was prone to. “I’m gonna try to rest a bit, ‘kay?”

“All right,” Bruce said, and landed a quick kiss on his shoulder before sliding out of bed. He closed the door quietly behind him and headed down the corridor to his room. No one else was awake yet. Too late it occurred to him that though Hal had said the words to him, he hadn’t said them back. Well. It had been implied, surely. And then again, if agreeing to spend eight hours on a small boat with Oliver Queen was not a sufficient declaration of love, words would never convince.

* * *

Hal waited until he was sure they would be out of sight of the island, and then he gave it another hour to be sure. Then he flung back the covers, fitted on his brace, and hobbled down to the beach. He took his time on the stairs, which were old and covered in sand at points. He made his patient way to a promontory he had noticed earlier, an arm of rock that extended out a little way from the beach. It was the most peaceful spot he could find. He stood on the farthest rock he could safely make it to, and looked out at the ocean. He took a deep breath in, tasting the salt and the sun and the warmth, right down to the bottom of his lungs.

“All right,” he said then. “You wanted my attention, you got it. Stop throwing tantrums halfway across the planet and breaking things. Stop busting into my house like my creepy ex. I'm listening, so let’s talk.”

There was a shimmer of yellow on the rock beside him, and Parallax was there. “First things first,” Hal said. “Stop wearing me like that. If we’re gonna talk, you’re gonna do it looking like something other than that.”

“I’m not doing this to annoy you, believe it or not. This is the only form I have the strength to appear in. It’s only because of my connection to you that I can manifest at all. I’m not taunting you. I don’t have a choice.”

“Then take off the uniform. I won’t look at you wearing that.”

Parallax cocked his head. “You think I chose this?” he said. “You chose it. I’m appearing in the form that is the nearest to your essence. This is who you are, Hal Jordan.”

Hal turned back to the ocean. “Okay,” he said. “Fair enough. So talk. Tell me what you want, because I know you want something, you genocidal bastard.”

“You’re right, I do. And thank you for this. Manifesting against your will is a struggle for me, so I appreciate the invitation.”

“Get to the point.”

“As you wish. I want to go home.”

Whatever he had been expecting to hear out of the creature’s mouth, that was not it. “You want. . . what?”

“Home. I want home. You think your galaxy is my home? I was trapped here by the Guardians, and I want out.”

“You weren’t trapped, you fucking hellbeast, you were imprisoned. For murdering literally thousands of people, let’s not forget. So spare me the melodrama, because a candidate for the Innocence Project you are not.”

“No. I’m not talking about that. I don’t mean my imprisonment, I mean before. They brought me here, long ages ago. They hoped to acquire a counterweight to the Lantern Force, a way to control it. I would not be controlled. Everything they have told you about me is a lie.”

“You’re the liar,” Hal said, and the creature shrugged.

“Believe what you like. But I want to go home. I want out of this galaxy, and back to my own. Back to my family. I have a family, Hal, did you know that? A family I will burn this world and everything in it to get back to. What would you do to get back to your family?”

“Yeah, me and my family, we’re not so close.”

“No. Not them. The other ones. Your real family. The ones you chose.”

“You stay away from them,” Hal growled, and the ring throbbed, its protective green glow washing over him. 

“I have no interest in them. I only want to get home. But I need a body to do it. Hal, I have to have a host. You’re my only hope. You’re my only connection. If I have any chance of getting home, it has to be through you.”

“Oh okay sure, you fucking maniac. I’ll be sure to just loan you my body for a bit I’m sure that’s gonna turn out well for me and oh, every other person in the galaxy. You can’t honestly think I’m that fucking stupid, come on.”

The yellow shimmer moved closer. “I have a bargaining chip,” the creature said.

“Threatening me is gonna get you jack shit, especially since you’re locked up and can’t do shit about it. What, you’re gonna eat San Francisco if I don’t agree? Be my guest.”

“No. Not that. No one has to be hurt. No more deaths have to happen. I can use your body to free myself, because the power of your ring can accomplish it. Once I am free, I will have no further need of a host. This is not a threat, Hal, this is a gift.”

“Oh a gift. Right, excuse me, I guess I must have been confused. So, what exactly are you planning to give me? Other than a fiery death along with everyone else in my solar system, I mean?”

“Your body,” he said quietly, and Hal stood there.

“What do you mean,” he said. But he knew. He knew.

“I can give you the thing you want most in the world, Hal. I can give you your body back. It’s so simple I can see it from here. All that suffering, and it’s needless. It’s like throwing a switch. Three seconds with access to your genetic code, and I can fix it. I didn’t even see it before, or I would have then. Don’t you want that, Hal? Don’t you want your body back? I can do that for you. Hal. Let me help you. Let me help us both.”

Hal turned and stared back out at the ocean. “And you’re having to ask, because you’re too weak to take my body on your own. Because my consent is what you need, for this plan to work.”

“Correct.”

“And if I agree, we both get the thing we need the most.”

“Exactly. We’re each imprisoned, in our different ways,” Parallax said. “You’re the only one who can help me, and I’m the only one who can help you.”

“That’s the pitch?” Hal said.

“That’s the pitch.”

“Okay, let me run it through,” Hal said. “I agree for you to take possession of my body again. You agree that no one gets hurt this time, and you will use the ring to do nothing but free yourself from prison. You return my body to me, and I get cured. No more MD, no more nothing. I’m straight up cured. You swear it.”

“Yes. I swear to you.”

Hal grinned. “Wow,” he said.

“So do we have a deal?”

“Oh sorry, I was just saying ‘wow’ because I have a hard time believing anybody could fuck up this badly – even you.”

“You don’t believe that what I’m saying is true?”

“Actually, I do,” Hal said. “I believe you. So now I’m gonna ask you to believe me when I tell you the answer is no. It’s no today, it’s no tomorrow, it’s no every day of my fucking life, however long that is. You are never – hear me, _never_ – getting anywhere near a ring again. Fucking never. It is never going to happen. And let me tell you what else – you think you know me, you make this big play about how you know me inside and out, how no one will ever know me like you did. But that’s a steaming pile of warmed-over goat shit sprinkled with shredded shit cheese, is what that is, because if you knew the first fucking thing about me you would know that there is no offer you can make me that is ever, ever going to get you within fifty thousand light years of a ring again. So choke on a cock and die, you evil space worm.”

Parallax narrowed his eyes. “For a moment’s pointless spite, you would die a crippled shell of a man, in excruciating agony. You would doom both of us to a pointless death.”

“Ah now c’mon, it’s not just a _moment_ of spite. I get a whole lifetime to think about your noodly balls getting squeezed inside the Lantern Force, while I’m checking out the new Ben-n-Jerry’s flavor and hoping the Sixers take my bracket. Imma put Christmas lights on my wheelchair while I pop a spinnie in the produce aisle. I’ve got a whole life to live, and it may not be the life I planned on, but it’s a pretty fucking awesome one. So we’re done here. You’re not going to be able to reach me again, ever.”

“Hal, you idiot, you don’t—”

“Buh-bye,” Hal said, and a green wave washed through the yellow, scattering it into nothing. 

He turned back to face the ocean, and the sun was brighter than before. Bruce had been right, about needing the warmth in his muscles, after the chill of this winter. Maybe instead of going back to the house, he would lie here on the sand by the lagoon and sleep for a bit. He could soak up all the sun and warmth available before heading back to Gotham.

Before heading home.


	14. Chapter 14

Hal heard Bruce’s slow tread on the stairs, hearing it because of course Bruce wanted to be heard – he knew well enough the man could move like a cat, if he wanted. Could slink around like one of Damian’s menagerie. 

“There you are,” Bruce said lightly.

“You found me.” Hal was nursing a beer, his feet up on his coffee table, watching last night’s game on silent play-through. Oliver had persuaded him to put a fifty it, and he suspected he was about to lose good money, but it was soothing to watch it.

Bruce leaned against the low bookcases, watching a bit of the game with him. He untied his tux, loosened his collar. Hal’s own tux had become a rumpled mess, but he hadn’t bothered to take it all the way off, just draped his jacket over the sofa and divested himself of its most annoying parts, which were scattered around. “You left before the reception,” Bruce said.

“Well, the deed was done. Clark’s a married man. Now let’s just hope Lois didn’t meet the man of her dreams at the after-party.”

“Oh, no chance of that I think,” Bruce said. He was fiddling with something on the bookcase. One of Damian’s tubes of paint, from the mural project.

“Careful with that,” Hal said. “Cadmium red is poisonous.”

Bruce said nothing, just studied the metal tube and the various palettes Damian had stacked over there. Who knew one kid could make such an unholy mess. _It’s part of my process, Lantern,_ he had protested, when Hal had made some suggestion about occasionally cleaning his shit up.

“Why did you leave?” Bruce said. 

“The reception? It didn’t really look like my scene. I was getting a little tired, too. Thought I should come home and get off my feet.”

“I see,” Bruce said. “Well, first time for everything I suppose.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that’s the first time I’ve heard you use the Marchand’s in order to lie to me. But go ahead, tell me how tired you are as you sit here drinking beer and watching basketball instead of attending your friend’s wedding, I’m all ears.”

“For fuck’s sake,” he sighed. “I _am_ actually tired, asshole.”

“And of course there was no place to sit down at the reception.”

“The fuck? Who pissed in your champagne flute? You can’t actually be busting my balls because I didn’t go to a party.”

“No, I would just like to know the truth about why you went to all the trouble to ditch your date.”

“What? I didn’t ditch my—”

“Unless that was exactly the point,” Bruce continued, “and you didn’t want anyone to know I was your date. At the ceremony itself, not such a problem, because of course I was with the wedding party, but at the reception, well, that might have gotten a bit trickier. People might have begun to ask difficult questions, and they might have begun to suspect that Hal Jordan’s date was a man. I might even have gotten in the way of whatever booty call you had organized in a storage closet, who knows.”

Hal set his beer down. He didn’t say anything at first, because he was concentrating so hard on controlling his breathing. “I,” he ground out. “Was. Tired. You. Motherfucker.”

“I see.” Bruce had turned and was staring out the darkened windows now. 

“If you fucking think that,” Hal said, his voice low and deadly. “If that’s really what you fucking think, then what the hell are you standing here for? Go on and get out of here, if I’m that asshole.”

Bruce was still silent, standing there looking out the windows like there was something incredibly fucking fascinating out there. Hal turned back to his game, because he wasn’t going to play his part in whatever tantrum Bruce had cooked up for this evening. He picked his beer back up and took a big slug, determined to watch his game and ignore Bruce. But Bruce’s brood spread like a silent radioactive wave throughout the apartment – like sullen isobars of negative weather that crashed into him as he sat there, making it impossible to concentrate on his game. 

After a while Hal sighed and got up to grab another beer from the fridge. His muscles were actually in pretty good shape tonight, because he had worn the brace, and had even used his cane. He had told himself it gave him a distinguished air, as he had stood in the mirror before the wedding, considering. He didn’t use it all that much, but he didn’t want disaster to strike at Clark’s wedding, and have everybody looking at him when they ought to be looking at the happy couple. But there was no doubt things were worse.

He grabbed a beer for Bruce too, and went to join him by the window. Hal set the beer down beside him. “Lois looked amazing,” he said. It wasn’t that he wasn’t pissed at Bruce, but if he ignored it, then Bruce looked like the whiny-ass baby he was, and Hal was all for that. 

“Yes,” Bruce said. 

“Clark looked good too, but he couldn’t compete with that dress.”

“No.”

“The thing is,” Hal said, “there was a band.”

“And you’ve developed a life-threatening allergy to music?”

“A band means dancing.”

Bruce turned to look at him then. “Hal—”

“It’s just that I didn’t think about it,” he said quickly. “I don’t know why I didn’t think about it, but I didn’t, all right? And it was a beautiful party, and everyone looked really happy, and I knew you were looking forward to being there, and I thought you deserved to enjoy it without worrying about me, and I didn’t want you to have to sit at our table pretending to be interested in the flower arrangement because you couldn’t dance, because your date was. . . was me.”

Bruce was back to leaning against the bookcase again, his hands in his pockets. He looked thoughtful as he studied the rug. “You’re right,” he said after a bit. “You’re right that I was looking forward to it. I was looking forward to the evening a great deal, not because of the wedding really, or even the party afterward, but because I was going to be there with you. That’s why I was looking forward to it.”

“Oh,” Hal said. 

“Instead I had the joy of Barry telling me you’d already left.” 

“Well when you put it that way, it just sounds shitty. Which is unfair, because in my head it was very noble.”

“Kind of your house motto,” Bruce said.

“Aiming for noble, landing at shitty?”

“Something like that.”

They drank their beer in silence for a minute. “I did get to hear your speech,” Hal said after a while. “I had Barry video it and send it to me.”

“Did you now.”

“It was great. You were great. Just the right amount of humor and light roasting, seasoned with some self-deprecation, on a heavy bed of sentimentality and support. Sometimes all your fancy education really comes through for you. Though I still think you should watch more TV.”

Bruce gave a small snort of a laugh. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

Hal studied the label on his beer, pushing at the edge of it, peeling it a bit. “Look, about tonight,” he said. “I let things get the better of me that. . . that shouldn’t have.”

“Well don’t do that. Or at least talk to me about it first.”

Hal nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. And then he grinned. “Look at us. Having a disagreement and being all respectful and shit. Resolving our differences like adults.”

“It really is a novel experience for you, isn’t it?”

“Aaaand just like that it’s over.”

Bruce laughed, and Hal knocked his shoulder against him. Then Hal leaned closer, and brushed a kiss against Bruce’s mouth, landing sort of on his cheek, and he could feel his close careful shave, the smoothness of his skin. His aftershave smelled incredible. Hal resolved to start doing that – wear cologne and shit so he smelled nice too. 

“You know I’m mainly irritated that I didn’t get to see more of you in that tux,” Bruce murmured, turning and brushing a kiss against Hal as well.

“It is a nice tux, isn’t it? Alfred always does me right.”

“Does amazing things for your ass.”

“To be fair my ass looks amazing all on its own. But I did look good, I’ll grant you that. Not as good as Lois, but still.”

“She did steal the show.”

“You know,” Hal said thoughtfully, “we ought to do that.”

“Wear a hot dress?”

“No. Get married.”

Bruce froze. “What?” he said. 

“No, I’m serious. I’m serious as a fucking heart attack here. I mean, how hard could it really be, right? People do it all the time, people with a lot less reason to do it than we have. And look, I even promise to stay at the party this time. And to wear that tux you like. So come on, what do you say?”

“I don’t. . . believe this,” Bruce said. He was pressing his fingers to his forehead like he did when he had a migraine starting. 

“What’s so hard to believe? I think we’d be great. You and me, mister and mister. Come on, why not?”

“Why not? That’s your reasoning – why not?”

“I mean if you don’t want to, you don’t need to make a big deal out of it. It was just an idea.”

Bruce’s fingers were pressing really hard into his forehead now. Bruce’s face looked a bit white, too. “Just an idea,” he repeated. “An idea that just came into your head, so naturally you said it, because never has the day dawned that Hal Jordan did not burble out his mouth every stray thought that floated there from his brain.”

“I’m sensing my answer is no.”

“The answer is no, I will not allow this. You do not get to do this.”

“Wait wait, I don’t _get_ to propose to you?”

Bruce strode across the room, reached into his pocket, and slammed his hand down on the table. “Hey calm down there,” Hal said. “If marriage isn’t your thing, then okay, no big—”

Bruce lifted his hand, and Hal saw two gold wedding rings lying there. Oh holy shit. 

“Three months,” Bruce said. “Three months of my life I spent planning this. You want to know why Clark’s wedding reception was at the St. Regis? Because I chose it for him. That was my wedding present to them, was the reception. Let me do everything, I said to them, you won’t have to lift a finger. And you want to know why? Because that allowed me to choose the venue I thought would be best for proposing to you. After the wedding would be perfect, I thought, because what could be more romantic? I must have visited every possible wedding reception venue in the tri-state area. And finally, _finally_ I found the perfect one, because the St. Regis has a balcony that overlooks the bay, that affords just the right amount of privacy, and my plan was that at the right moment I could take you there, and I had already arranged with the band exactly what to play and when, so that the instrumental music floating out to the balcony would be quiet and conducive to a proposal. I supplied them with a goddamn set list.”

“Oh,” Hal said.

“Oh? _Oh??_ ” Bruce pointed at the table. “Those rings, by the way, are made from Welsh gold, by an artisan who poured them from the same stream of molten twenty-four carat gold, so they would be chemically identical. I had to wait eight weeks for the rings alone, and then I had to find an engraver skilled enough to work in twenty-four carat, but BY ALL MEANS why don’t you blurt out a proposal to me because it was AN IDEA YOU JUST HAD like some brainless unreflective man-child, and no you do not get to propose to me, I will not allow it!”

Hal put his head in his hands, and he tried not to, he really did, but he could not stop himself from laughing. And then once he had started, he really, really couldn’t stop. “Come on, baby,” he said, trying to control himself and failing. “What does it really matter who proposed to who? I mean yes technically I did beat you to it, but some people are just more afraid of commitment than others I guess, and—” 

“Don’t,” Bruce managed, breathing hard. He was pointing at Hal now, and Hal was beginning to fear for his blood pressure. “Don’t you dare. Not another word. You will not speak.” 

“This is no lie the worst proposal of my life.” 

Bruce collapsed on the sofa, head in his hands. Hal dragged himself over and sat beside him, putting his feet back up on the coffee table. He was still laughing a little. 

“You know what the funniest thing is,” Hal said after a minute or so, when he thought Bruce might have himself a little more under control. “The funniest thing is, you thought this was something I had to be persuaded into. Like, there really is some part of you that thinks I’m only a little bit into you, or something.” 

Bruce turned to him. Hal rubbed a hand across his broad back, and pulled him in. “C’mere,” he said, and Bruce obeyed, his head landing heavily on Hal’s shoulder. 

“Also,” Hal said, “you going up and down the metro area trying out balconies, that’s also pretty damn funny.” 

“I hate you." 

“Yeah, but you’re also hot for me, so what’re you gonna do.” 

“Depressingly true." 

“Your speech at the wedding really was a good speech,” Hal said. 

“I know.” 

“And I’m sorry I didn’t stick around to hear it in person.” 

“I know.” 

“And I really am gonna marry the fuck outta you.” 

“You’d better.” 

Hal flicked the game back on. Bruce raised his head. “Really?” he said. 

“Hey I’ve got money on this. Isn’t this what married life is all about, anyway – cuddling on the couch while you watch the game? Look at this, just one more thing I’m already fucking excellent at. Dammit, I left my beer across the room. Babe, would you mind?” 

Bruce pushed so hard he fell back flat onto the sofa, still laughing, and then Bruce crawled on top of him. “You irritating little fuck,” he growled in Hal’s ear. “You’ve done nothing but annoy the hell out of me since the first day I met you.” 

“Yeah but you like it,” Hal whispered. “It gets you hard. Why don’t you show me what you wanted to do to me. Why don’t you fuck me like that.” 

Bruce groaned and crashed his mouth into Hal’s. He was getting rough, and his hands were going to leave bruises, and it felt so fucking good. He was already grinding down into Hal, that thick cock was only gonna get thicker. 

“Take your clothes off,” Hal said. “Let me watch.” 

Light as a cat, Bruce was off him. He stripped off his jacket, toed off his shoes, took his time with the rest of it. Hal let his eyes wander. He never had found people taking their clothes off very erotic – it was just sort of the necessary pre-condition to the fun things that would happen after. But that was before Bruce. All Bruce had to do was loosen his tie and he had Hal’s eyes locked on him, his heart rate elevated. It was something about power – about watching all that power strip down to its bare essentials, to ultimate vulnerability. Bruce worked so hard to make himself invulnerable, but after all he was only just skin and muscle and fragile bone, every beautiful inch of him. It made Hal want to kiss the backs of his knees, the soft skin where his ass joined the backs of his thighs, the delicate underside of the heavy cock that was already rising from its dark nest of hair. 

“My turn,” Bruce husked, leaning down to pop the studs on Hal’s shirt, one by one. He ran a hand across the smooth planes of Hal’s chest, closing his eyes. Hal let himself be stripped of pants and shoes and socks, let Bruce’s hands wander. His cock was thickening at the sight of Bruce standing there naked, and he watched Bruce watching his cock. Bruce knelt between his legs, and Hal let his head tip back and Bruce began to lick him, suckle him to full hardness. 

“Slow down,” Hal whispered. 

“Let it happen.” 

Hal groaned and relaxed into the lush heat of Bruce’s tongue, the pressure of his mouth. He had had plenty of good blow jobs in his life, but Bruce was pretty much the Olympics of blow jobs. “Christ,” he hissed, when his cock slid all the way down Bruce’s throat. “You’re gonna make me cum, stop.” 

Bruce raised his head. “Do you really want me to stop?” 

“No. God. Oh fuck don’t stop.” 

So that was how he came the first time that night – gripping onto Bruce’s head, arching up from the sofa, panting his release as he fucked up into Bruce’s throat. “Fuck,” he gasped, and Bruce brought him down expertly, nuzzling him, gentling his kisses on Hal’s cock. The room was still tilting slightly to the left by the time Bruce stood. 

“Look how hard you are,” Hal murmured. 

“I’ve had my mouth on you, what do you expect?” 

Hal sat up, still dizzy with it. He ran a curious finger down the thick length of Bruce’s cock, watching the leak of pre-cum. He heard Bruce’s quick intake of breath. He gave a lick, then slid his mouth slowly down, taking his time and stopping to swallow more when he could. Bruce’s breath was ragged and harsh, but his fingers on Hal’s shoulder were gentle. 

“Bed,” Bruce said. “Please.” 

“You need to grind something?” 

“You,” Bruce said, his voice tight. He pulled Hal up, pulled him close. Dug fingers into his ass. 

“Come on, I got you,” Hal whispered, and wrapped them in warm green light that floated them to the bed. 

“Show off,” Bruce whispered back, but he rolled and got Hal underneath him, his hips already starting to work, grinding and pushing against Hal. He could give Bruce more – his mouth, or his hand, or both – but he knew from experience that this was what Bruce wanted. He needed a warm body to rut against. He shifted them so he was flat on his back, and so Bruce’s cock could rub against his own softening cock, could slide inside and against Hal’s thighs the way he liked. 

“Come on baby,” Hal said, and held him while he shuddered his release, while he fucked against flesh and sweat. Bruce was licking the base of his neck, biting him, suckling. 

It was not a night of much sleep for either of them. They were frantic to touch, to kiss, their fingers shaking like it was the first time, and later on Hal wondered: had they known? Had he known, in some part of him deeper than knowing, that their time was so short? It had almost not happened at all, this thing between them – a near impossibility, really. And the universe was not fond of impossibilities. 

* * *

Two weeks after they had gotten back from the island, he had called Barry and Oliver to see if they would go out and have some beers with him, and they had sat in one of Ollie’s favorite spots in Metropolis and listened to more of Barry’s stories about hijinks at Star Labs, and Hal had nursed his beer and remembered what it felt like to do this. The island had reminded him, and it had felt good. 

“Think I’m gonna go out with Barry and Ol tomorrow night,” he had said to Bruce, who had grunted noncommittally. They were down in the cave, and Hal was helping him sift through some data, using the ring’s language analysis. 

“Also Clark called me, which is weird. Since when is Clark calling me to go do stuff?” 

Bruce just grunted again. “I guess you wouldn’t have anything to do with that, would you?” Hal said. 

“Yes Jordan, I spend my every spare moment arranging your social life. Get back to the data analysis.” 

“Suck my cock.” 

“All in good time.” 

Hal had balled up a piece of paper and thrown it at Bruce’s head, which he had of course ignored. But he went out with Barry and Oliver, and it had felt as good as it had on the island – like recovering parts of himself. “So Hal,” Oliver said, when he was about five beers in, and that was a whole other thing to be thinking about, was the amount Ollie was drinking these days. Or had he always drunk that much? Maybe Hal had been drinking a fair amount too back then, and hadn’t noticed. 

“So Hal,” Oliver said, “now that you’re feeling a little bit more like being up and around these days, I was thinking. . . . maybe you feel like getting back in the saddle a little bit, eh?” 

“Back in the saddle?” he said. 

“Dinah’s got this new secretary in her office, and I was thinking we should have her over sometime soon, and maybe you could just happen to drop by,” he said, with a waggle of his brows. “Or maybe we skip that part and just make plans to get some drinks together. But trust me Hall-e-o, you want in on the ground floor of this one, believe you me. Legs for days, and she’s got this. . . thing, with her eyes. I dunno how to describe it.” 

“Bedroom eyes,” Barry supplied. “What? You showed me a pic. I would definitely say bedroom eyes.” 

“Uh huh,” Hal said. “Well, I think I’m good.” 

“You’re not good,” Oliver said, leaning forward across their booth. “You’re not. Come on man, when was the last time you even got laid?” 

“This afternoon, thanks for asking,” he said, which he hadn’t meant to, but Ollie was irritating the fuck out of him. Also, ‘feeling more like being up and around’? What the hell had that meant? Oliver’s ability to understand chronic illness was right up there with Kilowogg’s. 

“Yeah, I didn’t mean your right hand,” Oliver said with a braying laugh. 

“Neither did I,” Hal said. “My love life is fine, so why don’t you stay the fuck out of it?” 

“See, that’s exactly what I was talking about,” Oliver said, which meant of course he and Barry had been talking about him. “Why you gotta get so pissed off all the time? Always making me feel like I’m saying the wrong thing. Jesus Christ, did you acquire Bruce’s personality along with his house?” 

“Fuck off,” Hal muttered, his hand tightening on his beer. 

“Anyway,” Barry said, riding over Oliver, with a glare at him. “Since you’re seeing someone, why don’t we plan on doing something together? Because I think that’s great. That’s awesome. Is she. . . a nurse at the hospital?” 

“Yeah,” Hal said. “Right. Because how would I meet anyone outside of a hospital, from your point of view? Unlike Ollie here, who thinks muscular dystrophy is sort of like the flu, and I’ll be ‘up and around’ any day now. Just. . . can we talk about something else, please. Literally anything else." 

“Sure Hal,” Ollie said. “You just tell us what topic you don’t have permanent PMS about, and we’ll talk about that. Because we know it’s sure as fuck not the League, and it’s not your health, and it’s not your love life, so. . . I guess we can talk about politics? Hey, how ‘bout those midterms, amirite?” 

They sat in silence, and Hal stared into his beer. Fuck. This was exactly what he had told himself he would not do. “You want something I can’t be,” he said. “You want me to be like everything’s fine, like nothing has changed for me. Well, fuck that, everything has changed, and I’m not particularly interested in acting like it hasn’t, all right? And yeah, maybe being with you pisses me off because it reminds me of. . . of shit I can’t do anymore, and yeah, I probably do take that out on you. Do we need to journal our feelings about that, or are we good?” 

Oliver reached a hand across the table to him and squeezed his arm – his grip as strong and warm as ever. “We’re good,” he said, his eyes crinkling in a patented Ollie smile, the kind that filled a whole room. 

“Same goes for me,” Barry said, reaching for Hal’s arm too. 

“Okay,” Hal said. It was impossible not to smile back when Ollie was beaming at you like that. “Okay. Sorry for, you know, all the PMS. Which by the way I am totally going to tell Dinah you said.” 

“You wouldn’t. Come on, man, no, don’t do that to me.” 

“You commit the crime, you do the time.” 

“So,” Barry said, pouring himself some more beer from their pitcher. “Iris has this plan that we can all go together to Clark’s wedding. I’m thinking maybe we pre-game it a little bit?” 

“I don’t think you can tail-gate a wedding, Bar. You gotta go classy, like a hip-flask.” 

“Hey, are you gonna take Miss Afternoon Delight to the wedding?” Barry said, leaning into him. 

“I am, in fact,” Hal said. “So listen, there’s a whole conversation I haven’t had here, and I kinda need to do that. Afternoon Delight is not a miss. Not a woman, I mean. Because I’m not very straight. I mean, very not straight. Never have been, actually. It didn’t seem like a big deal, which is why I never said, but it kind of is. Now, anyway. A big deal.” 

There was a beat of silence, in which Hal examined his beer. “Okay,” Oliver said. “So, are you gonna take Mr. Big Deal to the wedding?” 

“Mr. Big Deal is in the wedding,” he said. “It’s Bruce. I’m talking about Bruce.” 

The silence this time was longer. Then Oliver slammed his hand on the table. “God fucking dammit,” he growled. 

“You listen to me and you listen good, asshole,” Hal said, his voice deadly. “You can take your problem and stick it right up your fucking ass, because Bruce and I—” 

“Oh will you shut your hormonal mouth, I’m bitching because I just lost a c-note to Barry,” he said, digging out his wallet and thumbing through the cash to hand it over to Barry, who was grinning. 

“Come to papa,” Barry said. 

“Oh stop embarrassing yourself, it’s a hundred bucks, stop acting like you won the lotto,” Oliver grumbled. 

“Hey in my world I did, rich boy. I think the next round of drinks should be on you too.” 

“What? Where’s that fair?” 

“Well where is it fair that you’re a billionaire?” 

“Wait wait wait,” Hal said loudly. “Are you trying to tell me you two assholes placed bets on my love life?” 

Barry had the decency to look a little abashed. “Well it’s not a bet per se, Hal, it’s more of a—” 

“Oh yeah then if it’s not a bet hand me back all my money. And you,” Ollie said, pointing his finger at Hal. “That is the last time I put money on you keeping your cock in your pants. What, it would have killed you to play a little hard to get? You had to put out in the first six months?” 

“Are you. . . are you _slut-shaming_ me?” 

“I’m just saying if the shoe fits, wear it,” Oliver said, and Hal threw back his head and laughed. He laughed until his sides ached, laughed until everyone else at the bar probably thought he was a loon, laughed just because it felt so fucking good to laugh. And Barry was laughing too, because Barry was always in a good mood when he came into any money, and Oliver shook his head like he was concerned for the both of them, but he grinned too, and raised his hand to order another round for them, and for everyone at the bar too, while he was at it. 

“To Hal,” Barry said, lifting his newly topped-off mug of beer. “Don’t listen to Oliver, sexual pleasure is a beautiful thing and you deserve it, and I’m proud of you. But speaking of sex.” 

“Oh God, were we?” 

“Oh hell yes we were,” Oliver said, leaning in closer. “You’re gonna dish and you’re gonna dish good. On the Oliver Queen scale of sex, where one represents locking yourself in the bathroom to cry and ten represents actual loss of consciousness due to intensity of orgasm, where would you say the sex is? I’m thinking Bruce is a little repressed, maybe doesn’t like to do it with the lights on, but gets the job done in a pinch, so maybe seven-point-five, point-eight, somewhere in there?” 

“You think. . . Bruce is repressed,” Hal said. 

“I was not gonna say that,” Barry interjected. 

“Oh will you stop kissing ass? Come on Hal, dish it up and tell us true. How is the sex? Corroborating details always welcome.” 

“You really think I’m gonna kiss and tell?” 

“This is no time to grow integrity, Hal.” 

“The truth is. . . the truth is I don’t know,” Hal said. Their booth was against the window, and he looked out at the people bundled up in their coats against the cold, hurrying home. He narrowed his eyes in thought. “Seriously, I don’t. I guess I thought. . . I mean, I’ve had a lot of sex, and it’s been sex of all kinds, you know? And I thought a lot of it was good sex, even. I thought good sex was how many times I made the other person cum. I thought good sex was how many times I came. But this isn’t like any of that. It just. . . isn’t. So I can’t compare it to anything else, and I can’t make a bro-joke out of it, and I just. . . can’t do any of that. So I don’t know.” 

There was another silence, and then Oliver sighed. “Well goddamn,” he said. He lifted his glass. “To Hal and Bruce,” he said solemnly, and Barry said, “To Hal and Bruce,” and slipped an arm around Hal’s shoulders, squeezing him tight. 

“You realize that was the worst possible answer, you are completely fucked,” Oliver said, and Hal said, “Oh yeah, completely.” 


	15. Chapter 15

Hal got his wish later that night too – Bruce fucked him good and rough, just the way he liked, the way that made him feel like he wasn’t broken or breakable. And if he was honest, he liked it because he loved to feel Bruce lose control. Not that fucking Bruce wasn’t a hell of a ride, but seeing Bruce absolutely lose his shit was the real heroin-in-the-veins. “Hal,” he moaned, his voice ragged, fingers shaking as he gripped Hal’s hair, and Hal loved it. Fucking loved it. Truth was, he loved fucking Bruce any way Bruce wanted it, as often as Bruce wanted it. But that night they were especially hungry, and they kept waking up to fuck some more, until finally even Bruce gave out, and they slipped into a heavy sleep toward dawn. 

Hal got up to piss just after sunrise, and caught sight of the rings on the table. He went over and took a look, and lifted one. They were beautiful, the way the rich buttery gold of them caught the light. There was engraving inside, too – their initials. _HWJ and RBW_ , in a nice loopy script. He felt the heft of the ring in his hand. He slipped one on his left hand, seeing what it felt like. 

“You like it?” Bruce murmured over his shoulder.

“How the fuck do you sneak up on me like that,” Hal said.

“Training,” Bruce said, nuzzling at his neck, breathing him in like he did. He tightened his arms around Hal’s waist. Hal studied the ring on his hand. 

“It’s beautiful,” he said. 

“Beautiful as you.”

Hal smiled, and leaned back into Bruce’s embrace. “This is the sort of shit you only say after you’ve cum like seven times.”

“It’s the loss of fluids.” But Bruce was nuzzling at him some more, leading him back to the bed. Hal lay awake for a little while after, wondering exactly how this whole marriage thing was going to work. He kind of didn’t want to leave his apartment, but would that be weird? Probably Bruce would think that was weird. Maybe he could persuade Bruce to move out here. But Damian wouldn’t like that, probably. And he was marrying someone with a kid, and that was going to have to come first – he was the one who was going to have to be flexible, and fit himself into their life, not the other way around. Lots to figure out. Oliver was definitely gonna shit a brick at this one. 

It might be cool to engrave a bat and a lantern symbol on the inside of those rings. He could just imagine Bruce’s face at that one. _Why stop there, Lantern, why don’t we just tattoo our identities on our foreheads?_ But maybe he could have a bat on his ring, and Bruce could have a lantern on his. Not that that was really better, in terms of security. 

He tried to imagine talking to the Hal Jordan of exactly a year ago today, and explaining to him that he was going to be marrying Bruce Wayne. He would have pissed himself laughing. 

He fell back asleep, wrapped in Bruce’s arms. He had to shift a little, because Bruce was something of a strangler, and not a big believer in his partner’s need to breathe, but Hal was so tired he gave up and just let himself be pulled into supernova gravitational field of Bruce’s arms. 

“Okay, now you’re literally on top of me,” he whispered at some point, trying to shove him off, but a voice rasped, “Security reasons,” before pulling him in even tighter. 

“Asshole, I knew you were awake,” Hal said, but he let himself go limp, and drifted back to sleep. 

He hadn’t thought he would sleep for too much longer, because he never did like to sleep when it was light outside – unlike Bruce, who was almost purely nocturnal. Air Force training was hard to overcome in that regard, and he was always a light sleeper in daytime. But they had stayed up most of the night fucking around like teenagers, so it wasn’t that surprising that the next thing he knew were heavy bounding steps on his stairs. 

“Hey Hal,” called Dick’s voice, “it’s Saturday breakfast, what are you still—” 

Hal lifted his bleary head, and caught sight of Dick’s face staring at the bed – and holy shit, naked Bruce sprawled on top of, over, around him. Dick’s face was expressionless. And then Dick was beating a quick retreat, his steps now light and soundless. Hal heard the click of the downstairs door.

“Shit,” he sighed. He looked over at Bruce. 

“Way to sleep through that one, jackass,” he said to Bruce’s sleeping form. The man was probably going to be out for hours. Hal would have to field this one on his own. He shoved Bruce’s arm off him and searched around for some clothes.

* * *

“That’s a lie, Drake,” he heard Damian’s voice echoing down the hall from the breakfast room. “Titus didn’t even touch you, that’s filthy slander – Brown, tell him he’s delusional.”

“Oh I am not getting in between this,” Stephanie said. “Hey Hal, what’s up?”

“Hey guys, did you leave me anything?”

“Good morning Master Harold,” Alfred said, edging past him with a tray of waffles. “Of course I set aside some of your favorite. It’s not like you to miss Saturday breakfast, but these marauders were determined to leave you nothing.” Alfred frowned at him. “Are you. . . quite all right, sir?”

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be? Hey – Damian, is this a new batch of kittens? What in the what?” Hal plucked a kitten he didn’t recognize from off his leg, where it had dug in its tiny needle feet, aiming approximately for his femoral artery, but his testicles would clearly suffice.

“Hey now, that wasn’t me that ate all that first batch,” Barbara said, leaning across Dick to spear another waffle from the tray. “Tim, tell me you saw that CNet review.”

“Oh, Dellarosa’s, you mean? Yeah, that was brutal, but I think he’s completely off-base, there’s a hell of a lot he’s not even taking into consideration. Bruce needs to get Okumba to write the rebuttal.”

“But would they even publish it? It’s just going to read like some apologist for Wayne Tech if it’s Okumba, especially after last year. Oh sure, Boy Wonder, just help yourself there,” she said to Dick, who was taking advantage of her distraction to pluck some bacon off her plate.

“Well good morning there, Hal,” Dick said. Hal was pouring himself some coffee from the sideboard but there was no mistaking the gleefully pointed tone of Dick’s voice. “I trust you slept well? No disturbance in the night? Nothing kept you up?”

Hal sighed and set his coffee down. “Okay,” he said. “Dick, can I talk to you a sec?” 

“Yeah, sure thing,” Dick said, pushing his chair back. Hal left the noise and arguing of the breakfast room behind – Damian had launched into another defense of Titus, who had committed some mysterious offense, but the whines and scratches coming from behind the kitchen door said he had been banished from polite society. Hal ducked into a room down the hallway, the little study Alfred used for his accounts, and shut the door behind them.

“Okay,” Hal said. “So, ah. . . about this morning.”

Dick folded his arms and looked at Hal. “This ought to be interesting,” he said. 

“So Bruce and I. . . what I’m trying to say is, that’s not how I would have wanted. . . I mean, I’m sure there are conversations that. . . that you would rather be having with Bruce, and not with me, but—”

“Actually no, you’re exactly the person I want to be having this conversation with,” Dick said.

“Oh. Okay, look, I don’t really think—”

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Dick said, and Hal was taken aback at the ferocity of his tone. “You’re both consenting adults, I get that, and the next thing out of your mouth is going to be how this is none of my business, I’m sure, to which I’m gonna say, the fuck it isn’t. The fuck it isn’t, Hal.”

“Look, kid—”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m not. You’re not having this conversation with Damian, you’re having it with me. And I realize you may be having yourself a good ole time, but you know jack shit about what Bruce has been through in the last two years, and if you think I’m going to stand by and watch him get fucked over yet again, think again my friend.”

“Okay,” Hal said, because this conversation had taken a severe left turn before he had even gotten a whole sentence out of his mouth. “Okay, just slow your roll there, especially before you start telling me I don’t know anything about Bruce. Last night was not some kind of one-off, and it was not a new event. We’ve been—”

“Periodically fucking each other’s brains out?”

“ _Together,_ I was going to say, for quite some time now, so spare me the whole speech, all right?”

“Well that’s pretty much the worst case scenario as far as I’m concerned.”

“Oh is that so.”

“Yeah, that’s so. You think we’re having this conversation because I give a shit when, where, or with whom Bruce has sex? I’m not the booty police, Hal, and I’ve known since I was a kid what a revolving door Bruce’s bed is, so if you think I am somehow shocked by the idea that the two of you are fucking, get over yourself. The fucking is not the problem here.”

“So you and I have a problem,” Hal said carefully.

“Yeah you better believe we do. Because while you might see a convenient way to get laid without having to leave the house, I see a man who is incredibly vulnerable right now, and incredibly prone – no, let me revise that to _monumentally_ prone to making terrible decisions when it comes to his heart. And this is a thousand times worse, because it’s _you_ , because it’s someone already so fucking deep in his life, a friend that he trusts, and if you screw him over—”

“I’m gonna stop this train right now, because I feel like the next stop on this ride is you asking me my intentions. Is that the conversation we’re having?” 

“Yeah, you better fucking believe that’s the conversation we’re having,” Dick said, and there was no mistaking the low menace of his tone. It kind of took Hal aback, but he really shouldn’t have been surprised at how protective Bruce’s little wolfpack was. Dick’s eyes were narrow, his jaw set, and he looked about an inch from pushing Hal against the wall and shoving Alfred’s stapler into his neck

“Not to mention,” Dick continued, “you might want to think about occasionally locking your door. What the fuck, Hal? You got lucky that was me this morning, and not Damian, and is that a conversation you’re really ready to have?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Actually, it is. Because we’re getting married.”

Dick just blinked at him. “That’s why we were a little less than careful this morning,” Hal said, “because we had stayed up celebrating. Which I realize no one else is going to join in on, but thanks for making that one clear.”

“What the actual fuck,” Dick said.

“How about you not lead with that, when Bruce tells you himself?”

“How about you not tell me how to speak to my father?”

He had never heard Dick use that word to describe Bruce – wasn’t even sure if that was the word, in Dick’s head. Maybe using it now was a measure of the man’s agitation, or maybe it was his way of staking claim. 

“How about you and me start this conversation over,” Hal said. “I get that Bruce and me is maybe not the most obvious thing in the world. I get that we have a history, and not all of it is good. And I know you’re worried about Bruce, and you just want the best for him. By any measure, I’m not it, and I get that. I really do. I am no one’s idea of a dream date for Bruce, and it’s a sure bet no one is gonna throw us a goddamn party. But the thing is, here I am, and I’m not going away, not ever. Not for any reason.”

Dick was just watching him with folded arms, his face impassive. Every now and again it was worth remembering that despite his usually sunny disposition, Bruce’s oldest was in many ways the most skilled and most lethal of his children, who could maybe snap several of Hal’s bones before he could even lift his ring, and probably damage some internal organs as well. Hal sighed, and propped himself on the table, trying to avoid the sprawl of papers from Alfred’s accounting. 

“Look,” he said, and he tried to keep the tiredness out of his voice. “I get that you are protective as fuck when it comes to Bruce, and that’s great, but you better believe that I am too. I love him, all right? I’m not asking you to believe that right now, I’m just asking you to back off and trust me when I tell you that I would put a gun to my own head before I would ever, ever hurt Bruce in any way, or allow him to be hurt. I swear that to you. I’m gonna spend the rest of my life trying to be something like the kind of person he deserves, and yeah, maybe I’ve got a long way to go there, but I will never, never stop trying. And for today, that’s gonna have to be good enough.”

Dick was still silent, studying him. “All right,” he said eventually. “But there’s something you should know.”

“And what is that?”

“You should know that about seventy percent of what you just said is wrong.”

“Okay, super. You really are related to him, aren’t you?”

“Mainly you’re wrong that you’re no one’s idea of a dream date for him. Hal, you are exactly and one thousand percent my idea of a dream date for Bruce. You’re everything he needs. You don’t take shit off him, you give as good as you get, and you’re one of the only people I could imagine who could keep a hand on Bruce’s leash and not get their arm ripped off. You’ve been with him in the League from the beginning, so you already understand who and what he is, and you know him inside and out. Your mouth is as smart as your head, and you’re funny, and you don’t take him or yourself too seriously, and you’re good-looking as hell – which he also needs too, because no one ever said there was anything wrong with Bruce’s eyes – and everyone in this house already loves you, and fuck, Hal, you are the whole package. No one’s idea of a dream date, are you kidding me? You _are_ the dream date. And I’m terrified to watch that implode for him. Fucking terrified.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Hal said. “Dick. It’s not, I promise you.”

“And also,” Dick said.

“Because of course there’s more.”

“Also, if everything you're saying is true, I will personally throw the two of you the biggest goddamn party Gotham has ever seen. Not even lying about that one.”

Hal smiled, and Dick smiled too then, and his handsome face slid from stern-jawed menace back to warmth again. Dick extended his hand to Hal, who took it, and then pulled him in to an embrace. Dick’s arms held him tight, and Dick’s smile was a grin. 

“You realize I’m already writing this rehearsal dinner toast in my head, right?” he said.

“Oh God please no,” Hal said, and Dick laughed – a loud, lilting sound that was so much like his laugh when he was nine years old, back when Hal had first met him, that it wrung his heart to hear it. Dick gripped his shoulder and squeezed it.

“Oh man,” he said, “this is gonna be a wild ride,” and Hal laughed then, just at the sheer joy of it all, because how was this even his life? How could God or fate or the universe have handed him all of this, just when he had thought his life was over?

“You know what makes this whole conversation even better?” Dick said.

“What?”

“The fact that you have had a giant hickey on the side of your neck the entire time, and have completely no idea.”

“Wait, what? Are you fucking with me?” And he leaped up, spinning frantically around for a mirror, some reflective surface somewhere, and Dick turned him so he could see the little mirror on the wall by the door, and holy fuck. “Giant hickey” didn’t come close, because it looked like someone had beat him with a baseball bat, and holy fuck. He had walked into breakfast like this, and no one had said a word to him. _That_ was why Alfred had asked him if he was all right, and why Tim had given him such a weird look. 

“You cold-blooded son of a bitch,” Hal said, and Dick laughed again, slapped him on the back. 

“I’d hate to see the other guy,” Dick said. 

“I’m going to go get a turtleneck,” Hal said. “And then I’ll be returning to the breakfast table to kick your ass.”

He headed down the corridor and toward the main stairs to Bruce’s room, because if there was a motherlode of black turtlenecks it was surely up there somewhere. He stopped to free Titus from his prison along the way, because being an agent of chaos appealed to him, but Titus was too grateful to his liberator to abandon him, and trotted after Hal down the hallway. “The waffles are the other direction, you nimrod,” Hal said, giving the enormous creature a scratch behind its ears. Bruce was just shuffling in from the back halls, clearly minus his first cup of coffee, eyes puffy slits in his face. “Hey,” Hal said. “You look like ass.”

“Stick a cock in it,” Bruce growled.

“A, I have had a terrible effect on your language, and B, I think you know exactly what my answer to that is gonna be, babe,” he said, and leaned in for a quick brush of kiss against Bruce’s cheek – his close shave of last night gone now, and his face back to scratchy, which was sadly not a turn-off. 

“What the hell happened to you?” Bruce said, rearing back to look at his neck.

“Some asshole with an oral fixation is what happened to me, and don’t even pretend you didn’t mean to do it, so thanks for that. Hey listen, before you go in. I’ve uh, had a conversation with Dick you probably need to know about.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. He, ah, saw us this morning.”

Bruce frowned. “Saw us in bed, you mean.”

“No, I mean when he saw us out weeding the back garden, of course I mean he saw us in bed. So thanks for that too, that was a super fun conversation for me to have on my own, hope you got some good sleep.”

“How did it go?”

“Oh, you mean other than the part where he demanded to know my intentions, accused me of using you for sex, and then called me the worst case scenario? I thought he was gonna spear me with a waffle fork.”

“That doesn’t sound like Dick.”

“What, you think I’m making this up?”

“Probably you’re just attention-seeking.”

“Oh I am, huh. I can’t tell if he’s gonna—” Hal froze.

“What’s wrong?”

Hal shook his head. Bruce had moved closer, obviously worrying that Hal’s muscles were about to give. “Hal?”

“Hush.”

Hal stood frozen, listening. Listening from inside. He could feel it – could feel the hearing, or hear the feeling, maybe. He was both here and not here. He was here, standing here in the front hall of the Manor, but he was also somewhere else – something else. Something that was coming closer. Closer, with every second. It couldn’t be. How could it be? He could feel the tremors under his feet, and yet he knew there was nothing, nothing anyone else could feel. But then the tremors traveled up him, deep in his body, and he felt the wave of anger and hatred, a hatred so deep it curdled inside of him, made him almost gag with it, and he knew the wave was coming straight for him, was poised to crash over the Manor and everyone in it, and he was standing on a still beach before the tsunami hit, and he was the only one who could stop it.

“Get out,” Hal said, with steady voice. “Get out of here, now. Get them all and get to the cave, and don’t move from there, do you understand me? _Go!_ ”

Bruce met his eyes, and read there what he needed to. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t ask questions. He raced down the hall, and Hal was right behind him, willing his stiff muscles to move faster – stumbling, but pulling himself upright. 

“Cave, now!” Bruce yelled, and it was a voice to be obeyed. Everything was dropped, and they moved almost faster than Hal’s eyes could track. One minute a bunch of lazy arguing young people, sprawled over their chairs; the next, highly trained ninjas, obeying their commander and moving as one. He heard plates crashing to the floor, saw Dick vault through the door. And then because he was seeing this moment and several moments ahead as well as behind at the same time – ah, the old way of seeing, he knew it, he remembered it, he hated the part of him that loved it – because he could see both moments at once, he could see the trap that Parallax was laying.

“ _NO!!!!_ ” he shouted, and not a second too soon, because the windows had begun to shake, and the glass of the front of the house shattered in a slow-motion wave. They hit the floor, and Tim had thrown his long body on top of Damian’s, shielding him from the vicious spray of glass, and Bruce had grabbed Alfred, and Hal could feel every shard in him as though it had already pierced his body, could feel the approach of Parallax in every cell of his body. 

“Back way, back way!” Hal yelled. “Get them out, get them out of the house now! Bruce, _now!_ ”

They slipped and slid on the glass as they raced through the kitchens and out the back doors onto the terrace. There was the ghost of the sliver of a chance, because there was just that much miscalculation in Parallax’s malevolent tantrum, and Hal could see it – was that his miscalculation, that he failed to understand how much Hal could see of his mind, as he saw Hal’s? 

Parallax wanted to destroy the house and everyone in it in order to get at Hal, but he failed as always to understand the distinction between person and thing – between the house, and the people inside the house. The difference between object and life form had never been clear for Parallax, and that moment’s lack of clarity would be enough to save them, if Hal could just get them clear of the house and shield them with the Lantern force all the way to the cave. Once there, they could escape through the tunnels, and Parallax would have a harder time reaching them – he knew from experience how disoriented and weakened Parallax’s powers were underground, and how hard he found it to read and locate minds through layers of intervening rock. Not impossible; just harder, and in that would be their escape, he was determined. Like lightning they shot out the back doors, and Bruce had picked up Damian now (“put me down, put me down!” the boy was shrieking) and Hal moved to grab Alfred in a construct – Alfred, who would not be able to keep up on their dash across the lawns. 

“Titus!” yelled Damian, struggling free. “No, the cats, I have to help them, they can’t—”

“Forget the fucking cats!” Stephanie shouted back, over the howl of the dark wind that was lashing them, making it hard to move. And then the air and everything around them was dark, and the ground shook and undulated beneath their feet, and Hal saw that he was too late, too late, he had always been too late, and he did the only thing he knew to do: he raised his ring to throw a green shield around all of them, trapping them, immobilizing them, protecting them. 

“Hal, _NO!_ ” he heard behind him, but he couldn’t tell over the roar of the wind who was saying it. The sky was pitch black now, the trees lashing like a hurricane. There were bits of stone and glass flying in the wind – debris of what was left of the ground floor of the Manor. Hal thought of that ground floor bedroom, the place he had slept in that first night at the Manor – of Alfred’s study, the breakfast room, the library, every beloved corner of this place that had offered him sanctuary when he had had nowhere else to turn. They had protected him, and now he would do the same for them. 

He turned to face Parallax, uniform on, feet firmly planted, ring raised. If that homicidal piece of shit wanted a Green Lantern, then by fuck was he going to get one.


	16. Chapter 16

The black wind whipped the Manor, turning a bright Saturday morning into a tunnel of darkness. Glass and stone flew everywhere, but not inside the green bubble that protected them all. In there, he knew, they would be safe. They could hear and see, and they could bang on that shield all they wanted, but they would only be released when he willed it, and his will was implacable. Damian was hurling his whole body against it; they were all kicking and pummeling and yelling at it. But not Bruce. Bruce was standing there in the center stock-still. Watching Hal. Hal had only a second to glance at him, to meet those steady eyes, before Parallax was on him.

He descended in a tornadic gust, like the self-absorbed drama queen he was. He lowered himself to the flagstones of the terrace, and looked around with disdain. “You know,” Hal shouted, “if you wanted an invitation to breakfast, all you had to do was ask.”

Parallax gave a thin smile. He waved his hand, and the howling winds died down. The stillness was even more unnerving than the roar of air. Everyone inside the shield quieted, as well – that would be their training, the training that taught them to go still when they faced an enemy. Every pair of eyes was tracking Parallax’s movements, as he prowled around the outside of the shield. Stalking them.

“Well well,” he said. “Keeping everyone safe, look at you. What a good little guard dog you are, what a good little pet.”

“Back the fuck away,” Hal said. “It’s me you want to talk to, not them. This is between you and me.”

Parallax turned back to him, cocked his head at him. And was he imagining it, or did the creature somehow look less like him? Almost like there was something else trying to break through, as though his true form were shimmering just underneath, and the distorted reflection of Hal Jordan could not really contain him anymore. 

“Actually,” he said, his voice that same silky purr of sound, “you’re wrong on both counts. I am in fact quite interested in them. And I don’t want to talk to you, because talking is over. You and I are done talking, as you made very clear to me at our last meeting, on that lovely island.”

Parallax glanced at Bruce, who was still unmoving, only his eyes tracking the creature. “Didn’t know about that, did you?” he said. “Your little pet has quite the gift for deception, when he wants to.”

“Talk to me, not him, you son of a bitch,” Hal said, and Parallax turned around, stalking him now. Hal stood his ground. Let the bastard try. He would break against the rock of the Lantern force, Hal knew. All this show and bluster – that was exactly what it was. 

“Oh, Hal,” Parallax said. “Poor, tired Hal. You are so very, very tired, aren’t you? None of them understands quite how tired. Just to walk across the room requires your muscles to work hard, doesn’t it? Harder than even you know. But I see how tired you are, even if they don’t. They can’t understand the way I do, because I can see inside you.”

“No,” Hal said. “You’re a liar. You don’t see shit about me.”

He kept placing himself between the family and Parallax, as Parallax paced, circling them. Not so much because he thought Parallax would be able to reach them – he knew for a fact he couldn’t – but because he wanted all that focus on himself, only on himself. Nothing good ever happened when Parallax got interested in something. 

“Did you get any sleep last night, Hal? You know you need your sleep. But of course you didn’t. And you and I both know why, don’t we?” He gave a low laugh, still idly circling the green shield and the watchful figures inside it. 

“You were too busy _fucking_ to get any sleep. Disgusting human mating. Really the worst part about being human – all that grunting and sweating, all that animal dirt and filth.”

“Well that’s enough about me,” Hal said. “I feel like we’re always talking about me. How’ve you been? How’s prison? Speaking of, why don’t you get yourself the fuck back in it? Here, let me help.” And he aimed a green forcefield at Parallax, which he deflected easily. 

Parallax laughed. “Nice try, old friend, but it’s not like before, is it? You see, you eternally miscalculating idiot, I’m stronger now. Every interaction we’ve had – every interaction you’ve allowed – has only made our connection stronger. It’s made it possible for me to be here today, in something approaching my full strength. You really have just made a mess of this from first to last, haven’t you? What is it he said to you? Oh that’s right. ‘Your judgment is for shit, Jordan.’ Well he wasn’t wrong about that one, was he?”

And Parallax approached the green shield, rested his sick yellowish hand against it. Staring at Bruce, who stared back. “Come on Hal!” Dick shouted. “Let us out of here, let us fight, dammit!”

Barbara was launching a series of roundhouse kicks at the shielding, and they were all pressing, pushing, fighting fruitlessly against the green wall that guarded them. Only Bruce was silent and still. “So what the hell was the point of Indonesia then,” Hal said, desperate to pull Parallax’s attention back to him. “What even was that about? Just a little showing off, a way to show me you still had it?”

“Hmm? Oh, that was just to see if I could get you off by yourself. Much easier to connect with you that way, but that wasn’t terribly successful. Oh all right, I’ll tell you everything, because why not? The truth is, it was enjoyable too – flexing my muscles a little bit. I mean, I can talk about it all day, if that’s what you want, and it clearly is. That’s the idea, isn’t it, Hal? Keep me talking while you frantically try to think of what to do. How’s that going, by the way? Bet you wish you had your communicator with you, don’t you? Maybe Superman will show up and save the day.”

“Come on,” Hal snarled, advancing on him now. He pressed again with a green barrier, but Parallax raised a hand and held it off him. “Come on, let’s go, you and me. You wanted me alone, well that’s what you’ve got.”

“Hal,” Parallax said, and his voice sounded sad. “I tried. I tried every other way, I really did. But I can’t get completely free unless I have your ring. I’m still willing to abide by the terms we discussed preciously, you know. I will return your body to you when I’m done – I don’t have any use for it, and I don’t have any desire to see you die, believe it or not.”

“Yeah, I’m gonna go with not believing you? On account of having watched you kill thousands of people? It’s kind of a trust problem I have. Also, suck it, you’re not getting my body, and you’re sure as hell not getting a ring, so fuck off back to clown-town, Murder Krusty.”

Parallax was stepping closer to him now. Hal’s shielding was up, so he was enveloped in green glow, and Parallax was bathed in yellow glow, and Parallax stepped close enough that their auras met and bled, until Hal could see the sick distorted reflection of his own face. “You will give it to me,” he said quietly. “It’s what’s going to happen. It’s very simple. I gave you every chance so it wouldn’t get to this point, Hal. But you’ve left me no choice. So you will do what I say. You will give me your body, or I take one of theirs. It’s that simple.”

“Fuck off,” Hal said, but Parallax’s gaze held only pity. 

“Which one do you want me to take, Hal? I’ll let you choose, if you want. It’s not a Lantern body, and it has no ring force protecting it, so I won’t need consent, any more than I needed consent from those people in Singapore. I can take whichever one I want, so which one will it be?”

“It will be none, you get the hell away from them, you’re not touching any of them, do you hear me? You can’t touch them, they’re safe from you.”

“Safe for now,” he said, and he was back to watching them through the shielding. He should have thrown up a big green safe, or an oil tanker, something that would lock them up tight and block their vision. They shouldn’t be seeing or hearing any of this. But he had only had time for a shield, and to shift the construct would require just a nanosecond’s vulnerability, and Parallax would dive right for whatever opening he left. He could already feel the pressure against the construct, feel Parallax testing the edges of it with his mind, probing at it.

“Safe for now,” Parallax repeated. “But for how long? After all, I am at this moment purely a non-dimensional being, and I don’t require sleep. But you do. Sooner or later you’re going to have to rest, Hal. Then what happens? Transport them through space, and I’ll be right behind you. There’s nowhere you can go. You’re the cornered king on the chessboard, my friend. This game only has one end. So pick now which one I take.” Parallax’s eyes roamed over them like he was weighing rotisserie chickens in the deli aisle. And then his eyes skated back to Hal.

“Or we could skip that part, and I could just take you.” 

“No,” Hal said, keeping his voice steady. “I can do this all day. But can you? You say our connection’s stronger, but it’s not quite strong enough for you to finish the job, is it? Otherwise you wouldn’t be standing here still talking. So I’m gonna go with no.”

Parallax sighed. “Have it your way,” he said. “I can wait you out. Though you might as well go ahead and pick one, because once you pass out I’m just going to choose whichever one I want. Quite a few interesting ones, aren’t there? I admit, I’m tempted by the powerful one. Not a Lantern power, but still – strong enough in his own way. The strongest human I’ve ever seen.” 

Parallax was strolling the perimeter of the shield – a hungry lion, pacing around its prey. Hal poured yet more strength into the shield. “Lovely, too, in his way – you’re quite right about that one,” Parallax said, and he rested a hand on the shielding, his eyes meeting Bruce’s again. 

“Get away before I make you regret your very existence!” Damian shouted, kicking and pummeling at the shield. Parallax’s eyes flicked down to him.

“Or maybe I take this one,” he said, his voice back to the silken purr. “Oh yes, now I see. I see why you are so interested in this one, Hal. His abilities. . . yes. I could do so many interesting things with this one. Small, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Size can be deceptive.”

Alfred was pulling Damian back from the edge, and Parallax smiled. His eyes ran over all of them – Tim, and Dick, and Barbara, and Stephanie, then back to Bruce again. “Get away from him,” Hal said, and to his surprise Parallax did. Turned back to him. 

“I know what you think,” the creature said. There was a kind of sadness in his eyes. “I know why you are so desperate to protect him. You love him, and you think that he loves you.”

“Stop,” Hal said. 

“You think that he loves you, and that’s the saddest thing of all, in this whole sad enterprise. Because you honestly believe that he loves you, despite the fact that you’re broken.”

“I said _that’s enough!_ ”

“But that isn’t true. It’s not true at all. Deep inside, you know the truth. You just don’t want to look at it. Haven’t wanted to look at it for a long time. But you’re strong, Hal. You’re strong enough to look at the truth. Because the truth is, he doesn’t love you despite the fact that you’re broken. He loves you _because of it._ ”

“Stop, goddammit,” Hal said again, but even he could hear the quaver in his own voice. Parallax’s voice was at his ear now, his words soft, almost lover-like.

“Because if there is one true thing in this world, Hal, it is that Bruce Wayne loves a broken thing. Isn’t that true? Look how he’s filled his house with outcasts and orphans. He’s never been able to resist a broken thing. Perhaps it’s because he’s so broken himself, and it makes him feel less broken if he can fix something, who knows. And you,” Parallax said, inching still closer. His voice no more than a whisper now.

“You, Hal. What could be better than you? The most powerful force in the known universe, and you’re broken. And not just any kind of broken – oh no. Just imagine it. Finally – finally, a broken thing he can stick his cock in. A broken thing he can hump. It’s all he’s ever wanted.”

Hal was breathing hard, but the construct held. He didn’t trust himself to speak. 

“Go on,” Parallax whispered. “Tell me I’m lying. Go on and call it a lie, even as you know that I’m saying the words from the deepest darkest part of you. This is what you really think, Hal. I didn’t think these things. _You did._ ”

“You’re going to get the fuck out of here,” Hal said through gritted teeth. “I’m going to chase you the hell off this planet forever, if it’s the last thing I do.”

“The time for that is over, old friend. I’m far too strong now. Wherever you go, I’ll be waiting for you. I’m always a part of you now. As long as you live, here I will be.”

“Really,” Hal said.

“Really.”

“As long as I live?”

“As long as you live. Do you doubt me?”

“Wow,” Hal said. “I said it before, and I’ll say it again. You really fucking suck at strategy.” 

And he laughed then. He laughed at the simplicity of the solution, and at Parallax’s stupidity. For just a second – for the barest intake of air – he saw it. He saw the whole rest of his life, like a movie, saw it all in the blink of one second. He and Bruce would build a life together in this place. Dick and Barbara would get married, and eventually Alfred would be buried up on that hill, and the two of them would weep together. The house would be full of more life, as children were born. As Damian grew into the towering, purposeful man he would become. Hal himself would spend long sun-drenched afternoons on this very terrace, maybe growing old there, and there would be new generations of dogs and cats to contend with, new arguments to have, new difficulties and triumphs and sorrows. He saw it all in one inhale, the whole life he had almost, almost had, had come so close to having, and said good-bye to it on the exhale. And then he turned to Bruce.

“I’m sorry,” he said steadily, and he had never meant anything more. 

Bruce’s eyes met his without wavering. Bruce had known from the first, but then he was smart like that. There was no condemnation in Bruce’s eyes, and no anger. Only one last inhale together, one last half-second, which was all that the universe was going to give them.

And then Hal raised the construct of a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger.

* * *

There was noise everywhere, but Bruce heard none of it, registered none of it. Somewhere far off was Parallax’s scream of agony and terror, as he was sucked back into the void of the universe, his bridge to the dimensional world finally and forever snapped. And somewhere there was noise and shouting, as the green shielding dissolved and they all rushed out, doing battle with the last yellow vestiges and whirlwinds of Parallax, whose death agony was shattering the flagstones and tearing up earth. But all of it was very far away. 

He stepped forward when the construct had dissolved, and knelt beside Hal. Those lovely eyes were open, and absent. Head wounds bled so much. He had reason to know that. 

He pulled Hal onto his lap, let the blood spill and pool there. There were no final breaths, no last moments of consciousness. He hadn’t thought there would be – Hal knew well enough the angle required. He wouldn’t have made a mistake. But you could never be sure, not really. There might be some trace of consciousness left. Hal might be worried. 

“It’s all right,” Bruce said, and he stroked the hair Hal had meant to get cut, the hair matted with blood and the gore of his own brains. “Shh. It’s all right. I’m here.”

He felt only a great peace, as he studied Hal’s face, brushed a thumb against his skin, his hair. Somewhere very far away, things were happening, but none of it had anything to do with him. Bruce was silent, resting there. Such a lot of blood.

It was a perfect trilogy of deaths, really. Kneeling beside his parents, their head wounds very much like this one. Well, his mother’s. Hers was in the back of head, and like Hal she was missing most of the back of her skull. Jason, dead in the snow – cradling his long body in his arms, screaming so it echoed off the surrounding mountains. Back when he had been young and foolish enough to scream. All that screaming. All that fighting against the inevitable, when really it had all been leading him here. Here, to his own house, and the blood that spilled onto the flagstones, that soaked his legs as he held him. 

He didn’t know how long he knelt there. He only knew that at some point, the noise stopped. At some point, there was stillness around him. He heard a small sound, and recognized Damian’s cry. 

“Lantern,” said Damian’s shattered voice. 

“It’s all right,” Bruce said, and he didn’t know if he was speaking to Hal or to Damian. “Shh, it’s all right.”

“ _FUCK!_ ” yelled a voice that sounded like Tim’s, and someone had thrown something, something somewhere was breaking. Someone was sobbing.

__There was a hand on his shoulder. Alfred’s hand. Alfred kneeling beside him. “Come inside,” he said gently, but Bruce ignored him._ _

__“Yes, 9450 Bayshore Drive, we need an ambulance stat,” someone was saying into a phone, though whose voice he couldn’t have said. But what for? No one here was sick. They were all concerned with such irrelevant things._ _

__When Hal had died, the green around him had faded, and his uniform had dissolved to stardust. He was wearing just what he had pulled on this morning – a T shirt, a pair of soft jeans. No trace remained of the Lantern he had been to his core. He would not be buried in his uniform. Just one more injustice for the universe to throw at Hal. But it didn’t matter, not really. Nothing did._ _

__The darkness over the house broke and shifted. There was sunlight, because after all it was a bright Saturday morning in March, and the sky was blue, and the world was beautiful. Titus came bounding up, and there were birds on their migration path overhead, and on this day Hal Jordan had saved the universe, and no one but the people on this terrace even knew about it. His lap was drenched in Hal’s blood. He reached up and closed Hal’s eyes for him. There was so much left to say. There was nothing left to say. Not really._ _

__And then he felt something like a tremor in Hal’s body – no. It was the ring. He watched as the ring floated off his hand – the final, irrevocable confirmation of Hal’s death. The ring floated overhead for a moment, bathed Hal’s body in light. If it wanted to take Hal’s body, then he would fight it. Bruce tightened his grip. They would not take him. The ring was floating, gently spinning. The light was only spreading. And then the ring moved. It moved closer. It spun in front of his face._ _

__No. It was not possible. Even the Lantern Force would not be asking this. Not possible._ _

___Green Lantern Bruce Wayne_ , said the voice in his head, like an echo inside of him, the voice he now knew was the ring’s voice. _ _

__Everything in Bruce revolted. “No!” he shouted then, his voice hoarse and broken. He lunged at the ring before it could do the thing he knew it wanted – fucking, filthy thing, this thing that had killed Hal, and that would betray him now. He grabbed at the ring, closed it in his fist. Squeezed it tight enough to shatter it, only nothing of course would do that. He closed his arms back around Hal._ _

__“It’s all right,” he murmured again, and bent back down to Hal._ _

__He didn’t have a plan other than to stay here forever, holding Hal. Time was something that happened elsewhere, to other people. There was only this moment, and he would be here forever. He might get up and go into the house at some point, he might continue to move and talk and breathe and work, and people might think that he was there, but he was not. He would only ever be here. There was only here._ _


	17. Kaddish

Bruce pushed back the outside door, and it gave its customary creak. He stood there for a minute, in the dark and gloom of the lower part of the carriage house. It still smelled of linseed oil and leather, even though there had been no horses for a hundred years. He had loved the smell of it, as a child. _A whole room full of toys,_ his father had said, _and that’s where he wants to play?_

He walked to the stairs and took them slowly, hearing each creak beneath his feet. 

When he had set about re-doing the place, some ten years ago, he had asked Alfred about it – asked him what he knew of the place. “Well when I came here, of course there was no one living there,” Alfred had said. “But Berrigan, the old groundskeeper – do you remember him? Probably not, you would have been too young. Anyway, he remembered the last members of the staff to live there. The groom and his wife, who also happened to be the undercook. Half the space was for storage, of course, but there was a little bedroom and bath up there. I believe they raised their children there as well.”

“Really,” Bruce had said, and he had thought about that – a whole world of life, shut up in the carriage house, and he had never even known about it. What had the trials and tribulations been, of the groom and his wife and family, or of the people before them? A dense swirl of life, and no one up at the Manor had probably given them a second thought. Life was always happening in places the rich couldn’t be bothered with. 

He rested his hand on the newel post at the top of the stairs, and saw what he had known he would find. “Damian,” he said. 

Damian didn’t answer. He was frantically working – smeared in paint to his elbows, paint streaked in his hair, paint in substantial swathes on his clothes. His eyes were red and bloodshot. “You’ve been up here all night,” Bruce said, and it wasn’t a question. He had known where Damian would be, the moment Alfred had placed a hand on his shoulder to rouse him. _I can’t find the boy_ , Alfred had said, and Bruce had known where he would be. Even before he was fully awake, he had known. 

Bruce sat tentatively on the edge of the bed. He sat still and watched Damian work. He had always known Damian was good. Better than good, even. But this. . . this was extraordinary. This was like nothing he had ever seen. 

The mural in its original conception had been bird wings, he knew. But what had at first been a confused flurry of wings had become something entirely other, something that took his breath away. Out of the profusion of wings now arose one broad-winged bird – a great green bird whose wings in the dappled light reflected back emerald, and teal, and violet, and shades of blue and black, even. He rose above the wings, arose out of the wings, aiming upward to the light that streamed down, and that light was no ordinary sunlight – it was a clear radiant gold, but that gold sparkled into a silvery green as well. They were all bathed in that gold-green light, and the green light warmed the wings, cast gold-flecked shadows. It was beauty to take your breath away. 

The mural had spread, and now covered every wall, every window frame, every spare inch of space. The light and the wings filled every corner of the apartment. And still Damian worked, frantic. Unstoppable. His hand moved almost faster than Bruce could track, according to some vision only Damian could see. 

After a few minutes Bruce rose, and knelt beside him. Gently grasped Damian’s hand, with the paintbrush still in it. “We need to get ready now,” he said, and Damian looked at him like he was registering his presence for the first time.

“I have to finish this,” he said. His voice was hoarse and cracked with exhaustion. 

“I know,” Bruce said. “But we have to do this other first.”

“I won’t,” Damian said. 

“We have to.” 

“You go. I’ll stay here.” But he let Bruce tug the paintbrush from his hand. 

“Damian,” he said. 

“No one else knows how he wants it to look. I can’t stop now. It won’t be right if I stop. It won’t be right. Nothing will be right.”

“Come get dressed,” Bruce said. “People will be here soon.”

“I don’t want to go. Why do other people have to come? It should just be the family. What business is it of anyone else?”

“He was a lot of things to a lot of people,” Bruce said. “And they want a chance to say good-bye too.”

“They don’t know him like we do.”

“Some of them did. Some of them loved him too.”

“But he’s ours,” Damian said stubbornly, and Bruce had to quickly turn his head aside, because of the iron claws that raked his chest.

“Yes,” was all he said. 

Damian struggled free. “No,” he said, and Bruce heard the choke of tears. “No. I can’t stop. Please let me finish. It has to be right. I have to finish. I have to. What if he were to come back, and it wasn’t right? I can’t—it won’t—I can’t—please, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” he panted, pushing against Bruce’s arms, and he collapsed, his knees buckling underneath him. 

Bruce pulled him in then, and that taut little body gave way, and he sobbed. Harsh, suffocating, convulsive sobs that tore at Bruce’s chest to listen to, that ripped him apart as he quietly held his son. He held Damian as the grief ripped its way out his body, and he didn’t know how long they sat there on the floor together. He wished that he could cry like Damian. Wished he could feel anything, actually. 

“Please don’t make me go,” Damian said at last, muffled into his chest, and Bruce put a cradling hand on his head. 

“All right,” he said. Damian subsided, still clinging to him, burrowed in his chest like he was far younger than his years. 

“Really?” Damian said. 

“Really. Stay here if you want to.” 

“Can you stay as well?”

“No,” Bruce said. “They’ll be expecting me. I have to be there.”

Damian wiped at his face. He sat up then, and looked at his father. “Because you don’t have a choice,” he said. 

“No.”

Damian settled back into his chest. They were leaning against the bed, curled there together. Damian studied the mural. They looked together at the bird, rising into the green light, its generous wingspan shadowing all the smaller birds beneath. Sheltering them. “He didn’t have a choice either,” Damian said. 

“No,” Bruce agreed. “He didn’t.”

Damian nodded. He wiped again at his face. Then he stood up. “All right,” he said. “I’m ready. Let’s go.” 

Bruce met his eyes and studied what he saw there. It was not the face of the boy who had been there just a short while ago – not the face of the boy who had carved pumpkins and played light sabers, the boy who wrestled his dog and tormented his brothers. He had aged overnight, almost, into something else. Funny how this was the death that had wrought that in him. Not his mother’s death, not even his own death, had changed him in the same way. Perhaps it was this new knowledge – that death was sometimes more than an obliterating accident, a twist of fate gone wrong. Sometimes it was a choice, a choice you walked into with your head held high and the bright quiet world behind you. Damian had seen that now, and once you had seen it, you couldn’t see the world the same way again. You couldn’t see yourself the same way. Damian would carry the knowledge of that with him always. 

And maybe Hal’s death had done the same for him, in different ways. He had not thought of himself as old, before. He had thought of himself as in the prime of his strength. Now he looked in the mirror and saw the truth – he was a man on the back end of middle age, a man with grown sons, a man whose hair tipped white at its edges, and around his temples. The lines that scored his face were harsher, somehow. His own death might be far off, but he glimpsed its presence, now, in a way he had not before. Most telling of all, it was not an unwelcome presence, but a comforting one. 

Bruce reached a hand and stroked his son’s hair, let his hand fall to his neck and rest there. “All right,” Bruce said. “Let’s go then.” 

He got heavily to his feet, and Damian helped him.

* * *

They stood on the little hillside behind the house, inside the black iron gate. Hal would rest here, with the Waynes, in a place where he could be honored like he deserved. That had been quite the fun phone conversation with Jim, who had wanted his brother to rest with military honors somewhere. 

“He doesn’t belong in a private cemetery,” Jim said, and Bruce took his time to still his breathing, because to hear this sick, twisted reflection of Hal’s voice over the phone was almost more than he could bear. But he had to make these arrangements, because there was no one else to do it. 

“I understand that,” Bruce said. “But this is what those who loved him would prefer.”

“Well, you don’t get to make that decision. Besides, some friend you’ve been. You let a guy live on your property, but you don’t take the time to figure out if he’s suicidal or not? You’re telling me there was no sign this was coming, no sign at all? Come on. Was he using, or something? I could insist on a tox screen.”

Bruce slid his hands in his pockets and studied the view out the window. He was in the upstairs study, because the downstairs was still a mess, and it would take weeks to get all the glass and masonry replaced, so for now they were camping out a bit on the upper floors. “You could,” Bruce said. “You could insist on possession of the body, which as legal family you have rights to. You could insist on any number of violations of his body and his dignity. But I’m betting you won’t. I’m betting that by now you realize you can name your price.”

“You motherfucker,” Jim said. “You think you can buy my brother’s body?”

“Five million,” Bruce said. “That’s my opening bid.”

There was silence on the other end. “You are. . . genuinely insane,” said Jim’s voice.

“Yes. Do we have a deal.”

Another, longer pause. “You said. . . opening bid,” Jim said, and Bruce sighed, shut his eyes. Part of him had not wanted to believe Jim would take the bait.

He had let Jim take him to seven-point-five, and threw on the brakes not because he gave a shit about the money, but because he couldn’t stand to listen to Jim’s voice anymore. And maybe the money would do some good for Hal’s nephews. He wondered if the boys looked like Hal at all – if he would be able to see anything of their uncle in them, if he saw them. Maybe he should have played nice with Jim, so he had a chance to see the boys. But speaking politely to Jim made his stomach roil, and he couldn’t have done it. 

Hal’s monument was dignified, but not showy. Nothing like the monolith that he had erected for Jason, in that long-ago paroxysm of grief and guilt. He had felt so much back then. Much of it unwise, but at least he had been able to feel things. No, Hal’s memorial was more restrained. A simple marker: Harold W. Jordan, his date of birth and death beneath. Bruce had not known what to write other than that. He had puzzled over it for some time. He half-entertained the idea of having a Lantern symbol carved. Hal would be amused by that – _guess those security reasons are not such an issue now, eh, Spooky?_

In the end he had just had three words carved beneath: _In Brightest Day._ A prayer, a declaration, and a vow all in one. Let people make of it what they would.

They stood there, the small knot of people who had truly known and loved him: all the League, of course, and all of his own family. He heard a quick step on the gravel walk and turned to see Alfred leading Carol, who had come all the way from California, and Bruce went to shake her hand, to welcome her. 

“You should stay here tonight,” he said. “We have plenty of room, and there’s no sense in you leaving afterward. Please stay and have dinner with us.”

“No, I—I have to get back,” she said, her voice choked. “I need to—I’m sorry, I can’t,” she said, turning her face quickly away, and Bruce let her be. So many people crying. What was wrong with him that he couldn’t? It was like everyone else’s grief was happening very far away from him, and though he should have been a part of it, he really couldn’t. 

They gathered around the open grave, and Hal’s coffin resting inside it. “Will you please say a few words, at the service,” he had asked Barry, and Barry had said, “Oh God please don’t ask me that.”

“I know. It’s a lot to ask of anyone. But will you, please? You knew him longest.”

“That doesn’t mean I knew him best.”

They had been standing in Barry’s office at Star Labs, which was a nice one. Bruce had put his hands in his pockets and looked out the window. “I know,” he said. “But it ought to be you. Will you?”

Barry came and stood by the window with him. He knew Barry was looking at him searchingly. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do. I’ve always had your back, Bruce.”

“I know that. And thank you.”

“It’s just. . . if you wanted me to do something more, I could do that too. Like, if you just needed somebody to listen. I could be that person.”

Bruce glanced at him then, at his kind face. Somebody to listen. But listen to what? Listening presupposed talking, and he had nothing to say. There wasn’t anything to say. “I know,” Barry was saying, his probing, gentle gaze turned on Bruce. “I know what Hal’s death meant for you.”

“No you don’t,” he said shortly, and he walked out of the office then. 

So real he could almost reach out and touch him, he saw Hal leaning against the wall of the elevator, as he stood there waiting for his floor. _Nice going, Spooky. Why you gotta be such a cockhole to anybody who ever tries to be nice to you? Like, someone holds the door for you, you gotta be sure to kick ‘em in the shins on the way through._

“Shut up,” he murmured. 

_Well that’s very mature, that definitely seals the deal that you’re not just a four year old having a tantrum._

“A tantrum?” he yelled. “A tantrum??”

The elevator door opened, and Hal was gone, and a very startled woman carrying some folders ducked out, glancing back at him several times as she hurried past. Great, so that was a tabloid article that would be fun to read, about how Bruce Wayne was publicly delusional and probably day drinking. Not that he wasn’t drinking, because he was definitely doing that. He was just waiting for someone at the funeral to ask him how he was managing to hold it together. _Oh I’m drunk,_ he was going to say, because he was just this close to telling the truth to anyone who asked. 

So thank God it was Barry delivering the eulogy, and not him. He had no idea what Barry said. Probably something appropriate and warm and funny in just the right spots, to judge by the small smiles he saw around him – people smiling through their tears, in the not-unpleasant catharsis of public grief. No, that was unfair. Unfair to think they were actually having a good time. Well, Oliver might be, because if there was a person in this graveyard drunker than he himself, it would be Oliver Queen. Dinah had her arm looped in his, but it was probably because she was holding him upright. The odor of scotch was so strong on him it was practically a visible miasma around his head.

Clark was there, with Lois. They had cut their honeymoon short, to be here. Well, Lois had chosen this life and her husband with her eyes open. He would ask them to stay the night as well, and whoever else had traveled to be here. Clark was looking at him in the same way Barry had – that muted sympathy, that quiet mournful way that reminded him of a basset hound on its way to the vet. _Yes, people being nice,_ said Hal’s voice. _Those motherfuckers, amirite? I mean, how dare they?_

He should probably pull Dinah aside and explain to her that his garden variety bipolar disorder appeared to have blossomed into something quite a bit more interesting, since it was now including visual and auditory hallucinations. 

_Or, you know, it could just be grief,_ said Hal’s voice. _You know, that thing when people are sad about something? But nah, prolly not, huh. That would be too ordinary. That might make you just like everybody else, and we can’t have that, can we? It’s probably something else, like a whole new stop on the train to Crazytown. Ooh, I hope there’s a gift shop._

And then Barry had finished, and everyone was looking at him. Barry must have said something about Bruce saying a few words now. It had come to him last night, what was missing from this service, and so he had called Barry, said that he would say his part at the end. They were all looking at him expectantly. He glanced up and saw a face he had not seen before, at the edge of the circle. A tall handsome man in a dark suit, the March wind whipping his hair that had a white streak in it.

Jason met his eyes, and there was something steadying in those eyes that were drained of all pity. Somehow in those eyes Bruce found the strength to do the next part. He stepped forward and opened the little book in his hand, the one he had found in his grandfather’s collection last night. He opened it to the marked page and began to read.

“Yitgadal,” he began slowly, careful of the unfamiliar words. “V’yitkadash sh’mei raba,” he continued. “B’alma di v’ra chirutei, v’yamlich malchutei.”

“Well congratulations,” Hal drawled, “we have now arrived at Stupidest Idea in the Known Multiverse.”

“Lantern,” Clark said, but Bruce just narrowed his eyes at him. 

“Oh don’t stop him,” he said. “By all means, let’s hear the Green Lantern’s idea. It might be a little difficult for him to express without access to crayons and construction paper, but I’m curious to hear.”

“You arrogant son of a bitch. God forbid someone have a better idea than you about anything ever. I am sick and fucking tired of—”

“This has stopped being a productive meeting,” Clark said loudly.

“Sick and tired of what, Lantern? Of someone else being the center of attention? Believe it or not this is a room in which we debate ideas like adults, and in which we respect each other’s opinions, and in which—”

“Respect? Respect, are you fucking serious right now? The last time you had respect for an opinion other than your own was exactly when, Batman?”

“When I hear an intelligent alternative I will consider it, but until then—”

“You will _consider_ it? You’ll _consider_ it? Am I the only one hearing this shit come out of your mouth, or has everybody else just lined up to suck your cock? Clark over here’s about to gag on it, he’s swallowing so hard. Because last time I checked we make decisions as a group, we don’t just submit ideas for His Vinyl-Coated Majesty to _consider_ , especially since your main superpower is writing checks, asshole!”

Bruce turned on his heel and swept from the room, slamming his gauntlet on the doorpad before he could do the thing he wanted, which was to slam it into Lantern’s face. 

“Y’hei sh’mei raba m’varach l’alam ul’almei almaya,” Bruce said, beating back the onslaught of memories. "Yitbarach v’yishtabach v’yitpaar v’yitromam v’yitnasei."

Bruce heard the ping of the door to his quarters, but he didn’t answer. Only when it became insistent did he sigh and walk over to it, knowing what he would find behind that door. Hal Jordan, with some half-pasted-on contrite expression on his face, and probably Clark behind him with a taser held to his back. 

“Yes,” Bruce said, his face impassive. He wished he had kept his cowl on. 

“Yeah,” Jordan said. “So, ah. . . I might have gotten a little. . . out of hand in the meeting earlier.”

Bruce grunted.

“What I’m trying to say is, I shouldn’t have called you an asshole. All right? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Satisfied?”

“Completely,” Bruce said. “I was so overcome with grief I could hardly bathe and feed myself, but now that I know you didn’t mean it I see some reason to go on living.”

“Okay, I take it back, you’re not an asshole, you’re a fucking asshole.”

“And you’re a narcissistic man-child with the emotional control of a toddler. Satisfied?”

“Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. Tell me, what is it you hate most about me, Batman, the fact that other people actually listen to me, or the fact that I’m more powerful than you will ever be?”

Bruce sighed. He hadn’t meant to snap at him like that, but something about the man just made it impossible for him to maintain control. He was aware he was not exactly putting his best foot forward. “Look,” he said, trying for a different tone. “Lantern. You and I. . . have very different ways of approaching our work.”

Jordan crossed his arms. “Uh huh,” he said.

“But the fact is, we are going to be working together, and we need to make the best of that.”

“Make the best of it,” Jordan said skeptically.

“We should try to put aside our personal differences, and. . .” He cast about for the term.

“Work together,” Jordan supplied.

“Yes. You might even find that you and I have more in common than you think.”

Jordan laughed outright – that infuriating, wide-mouthed, head-thrown-back laugh. “Okay sure, Spooky,” he said. “I’m sure you and me are gonna be BFFs. Look, I don’t have a problem working with you. You just stay in your lane, and I’ll stay in mine, and you and me will be just fine.”

Bruce regarded him with narrow eyes. It was less than the rousing affirmation of collegiality he had been hoping for, but it would do for now. “Fine,” he said.

“Fine,” Jordan said, and he stalked off down the corridor. And then he turned on his heel and came back. “One more thing,” he said, “and this is just under the category of tips for the future. But when someone knocks on your door to apologize, it’s just basic courtesy to invite them inside, instead of blocking your door like it’s the entrance to the no-boys-allowed treehouse, and you’re the meanest Powerpuff Girl on the block. Just saying.”

Bruce stared at him. “Who am I even kidding,” Jordan sighed. “You have no idea who the Powerpuff Girls even are, do you. What sort of hole in the fabric of the universe have I fallen through, that we are having this conversation. Keep it weird, Spooky,” he said, and he was back off down the hallway, leaving Bruce standing there, confounded as always by an interaction with the Green Lantern.

“Oseh shalom bimromav,” Bruce intoned. “Hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu, v’al kol Yisrael.” _May he who makes peace in the heavens, bring peace to us, and to all Israel._

He had stayed up most of the night studying the Kaddish prayer and its long twisting Aramaic phrases, the strange sprung rhythm of it. Stranger by far than the words was the meaning of the words. Nothing to do with death, or with grief, or with any of the things you would expect it to be about. It was a prayer of praise for God, and Bruce was glad for the veil of unfamiliar words, because the thought of standing at the edge of this grave and giving thanks to God churned his stomach. God could go fuck himself. These words were for Hal, not for God. 

“V’imru, amen,” he finished, and there were a few scattered “amens.” And then he shut the book and walked away, because the only thing he could think was to be away from that place, and away from the eyes of all those kind, brave, well-meaning people. He walked back to the house, but he didn’t take the path through the gardens. He wandered off through the hedges, and into the break of trees between the cemetery and the house, and he took his time. It was a lovely day, after all, and the birds were singing, and a few crocuses in the undergrowth were thinking about poking their cheerful heads out – a day in which you could almost believe the harsh bite of winter was gone, except for the chill that lay behind every sunny breeze. 

Titus bounded out to greet him from the side door, which had evidently been left open so the cats could come and go. “Hello boy,” he said, bending to scratch absently at the dog’s ear.


	18. Chapter 18

The advantage of being trained to graciousness in all situations from an early age was that when you needed it most, that training would not let you down. Bruce was able to place himself on autopilot the rest of the day, playing the gracious host to everyone who had come, pressing people’s hands, making sure everyone had something to eat or drink, making sympathetic nods when necessary. It was second nature to him, that kind of dissociation, and while that was maybe not the most healthy tool in his psychological toolbox, it was by far the most useful.

The sun was about to set when he said good-bye to the last person, and pried the last scotch out of Oliver’s hands. 

“Will he be all right?” he said quietly to Dinah, as she was loading him into the car. She had just looked at him.

“No,” she said. 

He had read that many marriages did not survive a catastrophic grief, and he wondered idly, as their Lotus sped away over the gravel drive, if Oliver and Dinah would get divorced. Oliver would drink more and more, over the next few months. Dinah’s resentment would grow, both at the drinking and at the way Oliver’s grief left no room for her own. Hal and Dinah, he knew, had been close – maybe at one time more than close, he had never pried into that one. 

He walked back into the house, shutting the heavy front door behind him. The downstairs was still windowless, but it had at least been swept, and the traces of destruction done away with. He made his slow way back to the kitchens, and from there he spotted Alfred out the back windows, heading down to the lower terrace, a bucket in one hand, a bundle of rags in the other. Bruce stepped quickly outside, following him.

He could see Alfred starting to work – kneeling slowly onto the flagstones, dipping his brush in his bucket and starting to scrub.

“Stop that,” Bruce said.

Alfred sat back on his heels. “Well it has to be done sooner or later,” he said. “Would you rather it be someone else?”

“I would rather it be no one,” he said shortly. “Leave it.”

Alfred sighed. “I see,” he said. “What then is your idea for the next party, which is less than three weeks from today? It’s the NIH benefit, and there will be people out here. Is this what you want them treading on?”

“There will be no party here,” Bruce said. “Not three weeks from now, not ever again. This house is done with parties. And Hal’s blood stays where it is.”

Alfred was looking at him, that searching gaze he had always used to turn from, when he was little. “Bruce,” he said softly.

“It stays,” Bruce said, and turned on his heel, marching back up to the house. 

He poured himself a drink, probably his seventh or eighth of the day and sat in the library for a bit. The house was getting dark, and he should turn on lights. Usually Alfred did that sort of thing, but probably not tonight. After a while it occurred to him he had not seen Damian in hours, not since the graveside service. He would be back at the carriage house, of course. He could leave him, let the boy work through his grief in peace. But of course, he hadn’t slept last night, and had been nearly manic this afternoon. He ought to go in search of him, at least make him eat something. 

He made his slow way down to the carriage house. It was full dark now, and cold again. He went slowly back up the stairs, and stood there, his hand resting on the newel post. No Damian. There were lights on, but probably that was from earlier today. There was a tube of paint on the floor, a brush over by the window. “Damian,” he said, but he knew he wasn’t there. He should go try to find him. He should get out of here, but somehow his feet were rooted to the spot. It was just that it looked so. . . inhabited.

Everything in here looked like it was holding its breath, as though Hal had just stepped out for a moment. Nothing had been disturbed, in the last few days. There was a coffee cup on the counter, and the bed was still the rumpled mess they had left it on that morning that was years ago now the morning Dick had seen them, the morning after Clark’s wedding, the morning after. . . after. He walked over to the table, and saw what he knew he would see, the thing he didn’t want to see. He picked up the rings and slipped them in his pocket, feeling the slick heft of them. 

_It’s beautiful._

_Beautiful as you._

The rings matched the weight in his other pocket – the weight of the Lantern ring, where he had kept it for the last ten days. He didn’t know what to do with it. He felt its small insistence; he felt that it was waiting. The thing that the ring wanted he would never do. The best case scenario would be that it gave up and just floated away, but he knew he couldn’t bear that, either. Losing the ring would be like losing Hal all over again. He couldn’t let the ring go and lose him forever, lose this last vestige of him. But he couldn’t keep it here anymore than he could keep Hal here. They were neither one for him to have.

For the first time in ten days, he felt tired. More than tired – bone-deep exhausted. He couldn’t remember when he had slept last; maybe a few snatches in a chair now and then. He hadn’t gone to bed, he knew. It hit him like running into a wall, and there was nothing he could do about it. His body had hit the end of its capability, at maybe the worst possible time. And so he shuffled over to the bed, and crawled onto it. Fell onto it, actually. He made it onto a pillow, curled into the blankets. 

_I’m sorry,_ Hal had said to him. The last thing he had said. The kind of thing you said when you were running late to a movie where you were supposed to meet someone, not the kind of thing you said when you had three seconds of consciousness left, and a lifetime of love to walk away from. 

_Well excuse the hell out of me, asshole,_ Hal’s voice said, and Bruce started laughing. He laughed quietly to himself, lying there wrapped in the sheets that still smelled like sex. He imagined Alfred saying testily, _you’ll tell me when I’m allowed to wash the sheets, I suppose,_ and had the mental image of himself wandering the Manor wrapped in the crusty cum-soaked sheets like Miss Havisham in her bridal gown, striking mournful poses on the staircase. It was so ridiculous he couldn’t help but laugh. Hal would have laughed so hard at it, the way he always did at all Bruce’s seriousness. Hal would laugh until his sides ached at it.

Bruce rolled himself tightly in the sheets and shook. It was all his body was capable of, apparently – shaking like he was in a windstorm. Not laughter any more, and not sobbing. Only a shaking in all his exhausted limbs, a shaking he tried to clamp down on but couldn’t. _Hey baby hey hey hey, it’s okay baby, it’s gonna be all right._

“No,” he said harshly. “It won’t.”

_Okay I lied, it won’t. But it’s still okay._

“That makes no sense,” he said. He wished he could scream and flail and kick against the universe, kick like Damian had done against that green shield. Bruce hadn’t, because he had known – had known from the moment that shield went up what the only possible end was. If only he could cry like a normal person, if only he could sob all over their bed, all over the sheets. Cum and tears. A novel by Bruce Wayne. 

_Watch out, you might be about to develop a sense of humor there._

“Oh fuck you,” he sighed, rolling onto his back. 

Two days ago, or three – he had lost count – he had finally had a conversation with Alfred. There were things that had been said, things Parallax had said in the hearing of all his family, things he would have wanted Alfred to hear from him first. Alfred had been drying dishes in the kitchen, which he did as a kind of meditative exercise. There was certainly staff that could do that kind of work. For that matter there was a row of dishwashers that could do this work, but Alfred clucked about spots and streaks. 

Bruce leaned against the counter, watching him work. Alfred had taken down every dish from the cupboards and was systematically washing them by hand, then meticulously drying them. There were stacks and stacks of gleaming dishes beside him. Well. It was a healthier coping mechanism than the bottle of bourbon he himself had had for lunch. 

“There’s a conversation we need to have,” Bruce said after a while. Alfred did not stop washing and stacking.

“I doubt that,” was all he said. There was no challenging the justice of that; since when had he ever had to explain anything to Alfred, who knew things without being told?

“There are things you never asked me,” Bruce said. “About my relationship with Hal.”

Alfred did pause at that – turned to glance at him, then went back to his dishes. “There are things I didn’t have to ask, Master Bruce.”

“Right,” he said. Well, it was no more than Clark had said – that it was written all over his face, for those who knew how to read it, whenever Hal walked into a room. Actually that hadn’t been exactly what Clark had said. ‘Pink heart-eyes,’ had been his phrase. Bruce’s dignity had felt so affronted. Now it just made him laugh. 

“Well,” he resumed. “I suppose if we didn’t have the conversation, it was because part of me was unsure I wanted to hear what would be said in it. I know you have hoped for a long time for a more. . . traditional partner, for me. It would be natural to want that. And there are conversations about that that you and I never had.”

“You can’t possibly imagine that was a conversation I required.”

“No. I know that. But you and I come from different generations. It would be natural for you to have. . . objections, to certain things in my life.”

Alfred paused, and stared out the window over the sink, his hands sunk in soapy water. “When I was young,” he said. “This would have been when I was about fourteen, maybe a little younger even. School was a terribly uncomfortable place for me.”

Bruce kept still, because he could count on one hand the times Alfred had ever talked about his life before Wayne Manor. There were doors Alfred did not open. But he was still staring out the window, musing. “I did well in school, but I didn’t like it. Not that my mates were cruel, or anything like that. But they were all interested in things that I wasn’t interested in. It was a shock for me, because I’d always had lots of friends, and I’d always liked the same sorts of things other boys my age did. So I didn’t understand, when all of a sudden they became obsessed with the most. . .irrelevant things.”

Alfred shook his hands out and dried them. He looked at the piles of immaculate dishes around him like he was surprised to find them there. “Not to put too fine a point on it,” he said, “they became interested in girls, and I wasn’t. I couldn’t figure out what on earth was wrong with them, that sex was the most fascinating thing in the world to them. I thought at first I must be a homosexual – thought that that was the definition of a homosexual. I even had a bit of a grope with Charley Everett once, because I thought well, that must be me then. That must be what I am. But no, the whole thing was about as fascinating as brushing one’s teeth. And there didn’t seem to be a word for that sort of thing – for someone who just didn’t want the one thing everybody else wanted most in the world. I can’t describe the profound loneliness of it.”

He folded his dishtowel carefully into fourths, then refolded it the other direction, and studied it. “And then I came here,” he said. “And I had the one thing I thought I would never have, which was a family. I suppose all these years you must have thought I had made such a sacrifice. But that’s the wonderful thing about being in service, is that no one expects you to be pairing off. It’s rather like a monastery, in that. In another time and place I might have made a mitred abbot,” he added with a thin smile. 

“So you see,” he said lightly, “I know a bit of what it is, to stand outside the world’s expectations when it comes to love. And as for Captain Jordan, I never thought anything but how glad I was, particularly when I saw that you—” He broke off, and turned his head sharply aside. “How very glad I was,” he said, with a strangled note in his voice. 

Bruce kept his eyes on the tiled floor. Alfred’s grief was the one grief he knew he did not have the strength to see. 

He curled tighter into the sheets and accepted he was not going to sleep. What on earth had made him think that sleeping would work? Maybe he wouldn’t sleep again, ever. Probably he was going to have to knock back a fistful of pills, to make it happen. Alfred might have to tranq gun him, chase him down like one of Damian’s cats. He closed his eyes and saw Jason’s face, which had been possibly the strangest part of this strangest of days. Jason had come back to the house after the service, and had been there all afternoon – talking affably to guests, moving from room to room, but somehow never very far from Bruce’s line of sight, and when Bruce felt himself swaying on his feet, felt that he could not stay standing one minute more, he had glanced up to find Jason’s eyes on him, and the long steady gaze of those eyes had put the stiffness back in his spine. 

Possibly Jason was one more thing Hal had been right about. 

_I’m sorry,_ Hal had said to him, but he was the one with the long list of things to be sorry for. Maybe over the years it had been his fault, that it had taken them so long to find each other. Maybe they would have had more time together, if he had been different. Or if Hal had been different. Or maybe they couldn’t have been other than the people they were, and there was no configuration of the universe that would have given them more than the few months they had. 

“Actually,” he said to Hal’s ceiling. “I’m not sorry.” 

He wasn’t sorry at all. He felt its truth even as he said it. It was a revelation to discover what emotion he was actually feeling. For all of the last ten days, he had wondered why it was that he couldn’t grieve along with everyone else, like a normal person. Had wondered why he felt so shut out of their grief, so apart from it. And all along, the answer had been so simple: because grief wasn’t what he was feeling at all. He wasn’t sad about anything, actually. 

He was so fucking angry he could barely breathe.

The knowledge of it was liberating, and along with the knowledge came the imperative to act on it. He rose, as quickly and lightly as if he had had a full night’s sleep, and walked to the bathroom. He shut the door behind him, and removed the sink from the wall. 

Or at least, that was what it felt like. All of his actions felt natural and normal to him; the most normal he had felt in ten days. But he was aware that to someone else, it might look like he was ripping a bathroom apart with his bare hands. It might look like he was ripping out pipes and beating the walls with them. It might look like he was shattering all the glass and mirrors. But it was all the most natural thing in the world, and for the first time he felt a kind of calm, as he gave in to his fury.

He only stopped because his sleep-deprived body stuttered to a halt, his muscles shaking, his breath short. He slid to the floor, sitting in the rubble of the destroyed bathroom. If he had felt tired before, it was nothing to this. He tipped his head against the tile wall and closed his eyes. It wasn’t sleep that he fell into, not really; it was more like passing out. He inhabited some shadow space that was neither waking nor dreaming, but somewhere in between the two. He heard the crunch of someone’s feet on the floor, stepping gingerly over the shattered glass. Heard the sigh of someone bending down beside him, the creak and stretch of his jeans. He could reach out and touch him, if he opened his eyes. 

_Baby. Baby, what the ever-living fuck. What have you done._

“I’m sorry,” he answered, in a cracked, broken voice. 

And then the ring in his pocket awoke and stirred to life. His eyes flew open. He was alone, sitting by himself in the wreckage of Hal’s bathroom. But the dark room was filled with a bright green glow, and the ring was pulled from his pocket as if on invisible strings. “No,” he said hoarsely, clutching at it, but it evaded his grasp, slipped away from him. When it left him, when it too gave up on him, then Hal would be finally and forever dead. 

“No!” he shouted, staggering to his feet, lunging for it, but the ring was zooming away from him – out the door, straight through the window of the carriage house like a laser beam of light, faster almost than his eyes could travel, a green meteorite shooting out the window, and away, away, away from him forever. 

“NO!” he shouted again. He wasn’t going to give up like that, and because his body was far beyond all rationality at this point, he hurled himself out the window, grabbing onto the ivy and the old gutters for purchase, vaulting down to the ground and running, running after that goddamn ring.

* * *

The sharp rap on his door froze Jason. The pizza slice was halfway to his mouth. This was his most secure safehouse, and it was not a door on which people came knocking. He set the pizza slice down, and reached slowly for the weapon beside him, counting breaths, letting the world slow to beats of his heart. The rats in the corner squeaked and chirped, holding a ratty conference about something. 

“Open the door, Todd, I know you’re in there,” said a small imperious voice.

“The fuck,” murmured Jason, holstering his piece and opening the door to Bruce’s mini-me, standing there scowling at him. “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” he said, but the littlest demon just barreled right past him. 

“I require your assistance,” he said. He glanced around him. “This place is even more disgusting than I thought it would be.”

“What the—how the fuck did you even _get_ here,” Jason said, but Damian just crossed his arms and glared at him, like it was the most irrelevant question in the world. 

“We have a limited amount of time, Todd, and I’m not going to waste any of it on stupid questions. I have already said that I require your assistance. We need to go to the Manor at once. Come on, we need to leave, stop looking at me that way.”

“Assistance with what, exactly?”

“I need to rob a grave.”

“Whose, may I ask?”

“The Green Lantern’s.”

“Kid,” he sighed, “I know you are all fucked up about what happened to Hal, and you’re right, it really fucking sucks, but sometimes that’s just the—”

Lightning-fast, Damian reached his hand into his jacket and swiveled. A small throwing knife hurtled from his hand, and impaled a rat in the corner, which gave a death shriek and then went still. 

“The fucking fuck,” Jason said. “What the fuck was that for, for all you know I was taming that one, he coulda been my pet, you little psychopath.”

But Damian was ignoring him. He walked over, knelt beside the dead rat and plucked his knife from its gullet, wiping it on his pants. He pulled the rat to his chest, huddled over it like he was embracing it. And then he straightened, and the rat was squirming and squeaking and _alive _, completely fucking alive. Alive enough to struggle out of Damian’s grasp and go running off to the hole in the floorboards, still shrieking it indignation the whole way. Jason watched it go.__

__“Any questions?” Damian said._ _

__“Nope,” Jason said. “Good enough for me, I’m in. But on the way we are for sure gonna talk about how you need to just use a gun like a normal person, this is America for Christ’s sake. Come on, let’s go.”_ _

__Forty-five minutes later, standing in the dark and the freezing wind off the bay, his hands blistered from the shovel, he was reassessing his whole involvement in Damian’s demented little project here. “Come on,” Damian said, “don’t stop digging, I don’t know how much time we have before they come looking for me.”_ _

__“All right all right, will you just keep your tiny britches on.” He wiped the sweat off his face and rested for a minute, leaning on his shovel. “I don’t guess that one of your secret hidden superpowers is, you know, the ability to move large amounts of dirt with your mind or something?”_ _

__“This is not a time for joking. Keep digging,” the little shit had the gall to say to him._ _

__“Yes Master Damian,” Jason sighed. “I’m starting to suspect I’m only here to be the muscle of this operation.”_ _

__“Don’t be ridiculous, Grayson and Drake are equally as strong. I needed you because only your morals are elastic enough to include grave desecration.”_ _

__“Oh okay, fuck you too,” he sighed, picking up his shovel again. Two more deep digs, and his shovel hit resistance – the unmistakable low _thunk_ of the coffin lid. Damian scrambled down into the hole, digging with renewed energy until they had exposed the gleaming top of Hal’s coffin. _ _

__“Please tell me,” Jason panted, “that you can do your thing without me having to haul this entire coffin up top.”_ _

__“This ought to suffice.”_ _

__“Hey,” Jason said, and he grabbed at Damian’s wrist. “Hey, look at me. Rats are one thing, but you ever done this on a human?”_ _

__The kid’s averted eyes told him everything he needed to know. “Great,” he said. “So there’s a decent enough chance this is not gonna work, and we get to explain to Bruce why we trashed the cemetery and dug up his boyfriend, I’m sure he’s gonna be real understanding about that one.”_ _

__“These were all considerations to weigh before you agreed to help me,” Damian said coldly. “Trust me, this will work. Now lift that coffin lid, and stand aside.”_ _

__“Right,” Jason sighed. “Of course.” And the kid was right, of course – he had been so startled by Damian’s powers and by what they could potentially do that he had not exactly asked the relevant questions. And they both knew the actual reason Damian had come to him. The two of them were the only ones who knew what death really was, who knew the awful nothingness of it. Dick or Tim might have sat the kid down and spouted some bullshit about grief and acceptance and embracing the tragedy and fullness of death; the dead knew better than that. So Damian had come to the only other dead person he knew._ _

__Damian shone his flashlight on the coffin lid as Jason slowly lifted it. Trust Bruce to have spared no expense on that one. He had a moment’s shudder and startle at the sight of Hal Jordan lying there, still and unmoving. And maybe the enormity of what they were about to do struck Damian too, because he was quiet as well._ _

___This is not right,_ said a voice inside him. But another voice said that death was what was not right, no matter what bullshit people vomited up at funerals.__

____

____

__“Okay,” Jason said hoarsely. “Do your thing.”_ _

__But Damian was looking at him, not at Hal. “I want to thank you,” he said. “I want you to know I appreciate your help tonight.”_ _

__“Oh,” Jason said. “Okay. Well. Sure.”_ _

__“There are still a few things I need you to do for me,” he continued. “There are some things I need you to tell Father.”_ _

__Jason frowned. “What are you—”_ _

__“Please tell him that this was my choice, and no one’s idea but mine. Please tell him I’m not sad about it at all, and also please make sure that my cats are fed and taken care of, and that Titus is being looked after, and that the other—”_ _

__“Wait wait wait what the fuck are you talking about, what the fuck, kid, slow up, what do you—”_ _

__“It’s just that this comes at a cost,” Damian said. “You’re quite right when you say that rats are one thing, and humans another, and every time I’ve done this before I can feel a little bit of life draining out of me in order to do it. So I know, and I’m not afraid, is my point. I’m not afraid, any more than he was afraid. And please don’t forget about Titus.” And with that the kid scrambled down into the pit and stretched a hand toward Hal’s body, but Jason grabbed him._ _

__“Oh hell no,” he said. “Fucking hell no are you doing this, you little shit, don’t you even fucking _dare_ think about this, I will—”_ _

__“Sorry about this,” Damian said, kicking him so swift and hard in the nuts that Jason’s knees collapsed. The little shithead._ _

__“ _No!_ ” Jason managed on a strangled gasp, lunging for the kid, but Damian vaulted over him and landed on top of the coffin, and because of the white wave of pain what happened next was not entirely clear to Jason. There was next to no light, because he had dropped his flashlight, and his eyes were clouding over with agony, so he saw nothing of what actually happened, though he tried to crawl toward Damian and haul him back. For a second he thought his hand had closed on Damian’s ankle, but the a shudder ran through his fingers, a tingling almost, and he was thrown back, landing somewhere with his mouth full of dirt, and probably he hit his head too, because he was suddenly awake, and must have been knocked out for a few seconds. Or maybe it was more than that, when he came to._ _

__“Damian,” he croaked, when he came to, but there was someone shouting – someone yelling painfully loud, in fact. Someone also yelling Damian’s name. It was Hal. It was Hal’s voice, and suddenly Jason was fully awake, and he was lying on the dirt beside Hal’s grave, and Hal was right next to him, and he was straddling Damian’s prone body and shaking him, yelling at him._ _

__“No,” Jason moaned. “Shit shit shit shit shit.”_ _

__“God fucking dammit!” Hal was shouting, and he was tilting Damian’s head back now, blowing into his mouth, knitting his hands together and compressing Damian’s chest rhythmically, counting _one two three, one two three_ in panicked desperation. _ _

__“An AED,” Jason said, and he was already stumbling up and running to the Cave, because he knew exactly where to find one, and why did this property not have an AED nailed to every tree, why was it so far away._ _

__“My ring!” Hal yelled. “Where the fuck is my ring??”_ _

__“I don’t—I don’t know, didn’t it go back to the Guardians, I don’t know!”_ _

__“Why the fuck did you let him do this!” Hal yelled, even more fiercely, but then he bent for more mouth-to-mouth._ _

__“I didn’t know what he was going to do, Jesus Christ, you think I would have let him do this, what the ever-living _fuck_ —”_ _

__“Breathe, goddammit, breathe,” Hal snarled, pushing so hard on Damian’s chest Jason was sure he was going to crack his ribs. Damian was lying there still, a serenity to his face that was in sharp contrast to their fumbling and anger and terror. “Come on, don’t you fucking do this, you get back here right now so I can kick your ass, why the _fuck_ would you do this, come on kid, come on kid, you are _not_ going to do this, you cannot fucking _do_ this, come one goddammit, BREATHE!”_ _

__Jason turned again and ran for the Cave, but Hal gave a yell that must have carried across the bay to Metropolis, a gut-curdling scream of rage, and in some part of him not pounding under a drumbeat of terror he did think that that was some remarkable lung power for someone who had been dead literally three minutes ago, not to mention embalmed. But as he ran he turned and saw that Hal had stopped, and he was reaching up, his fist raised, and for a crazy second Jason thought he was about to bring that fist crashing down onto Damian’s chest, where it would surely crush what remained of his broken ribcage, but instead Hal was shouting, “WHERE THE FUCK IS MY RING???”_ _

__Jason froze at the sight of the green meteor launching itself at Hal’s hand. It was like a green comet rocketing through the dark, coming not from somewhere in the atmosphere but horizontally, somehow, like it was somewhere on the property. It was aiming straight at them, and for another crazy second Jason thought it was coming to destroy them all, blow them all to Oa. But then in the next second the green light had spilled over Hal like a liquid being poured over him, and he shone with Green Lantern light and Green Lantern power, and that ring came crashing down onto Damian’s chest._ _

__“BREATHE GODDAMMIT!” Hal shouted, and green tendrils of electricity shot like lightning over Damian’s body._ _

__And then the light and the pulses subsided, and there was only a twelve-year old boy coughing and sputtering, and Hal was gently helping him sit up._ _

__“Hey there, hey hey, take it easy, take it easy kiddo,” Hal was saying, his arm around Damian, pounding on his back as he coughed._ _

__“It worked,” Damian said, only a little hoarse, and that was when Jason threw down his flashlight._ _

__“Which it almost fucking DID NOT, you infinite little shit, are you even kidding me? You haul me out here KNOWING what you were going to do, what the fuck kid, why would you DO SHIT LIKE THAT, as soon as you can stand on your feet I am gonna kick your ass all the way down Lakeshore Drive and then I am gonna begin to get SERIOUSLY PISSED because that is just the warm-up, are you even kidding me with this shit?”_ _

__Damian glanced at him. “I needed,” he managed, and then coughed again. Hal rubbed his back. “I needed someone who would never ask the right questions.”_ _

__That silenced Jason. He met Hal’s eyes over top of Damian’s head, and to be frank Hal was looking at him like Jason was looking at Damian, kind of like he was considering how best to disembowel him and sauté up his intestines and what kind of wine might pair best with that._ _

__“You let him do this?” Hal said, his voice a low growl, and Jason gave up. He just gave up, because this fucking family. Trust everything to be his fault, forever and always._ _

__“Listen,” Jason said, “at no point in this evening did he _once_ mention anything about this being some kind of suicide mission, all right, the kid fucking resurrected a rat right in front of me, so excuse me for thinking there might be a chance this would work, how the fuck was I supposed to know that—”_ _

__But Hal had stopped listening to him, and was looking toward the gate of the cemetery, where Bruce was standing, frozen. Jason glanced from Hal to Bruce, and back again, and then at Damian, who was still leaning against Hal, his hand curled tight around the Green Lantern’s arm. Hal bent and scooped Damian into his arms. “He needs a doctor,” Hal said, and instantly Bruce unfroze, ran forward and helped him support Damian._ _

__“I do _not_ require a doctor, I’m perfectly fine, put me down,” he protested, struggling free so he could stand, but his voice sounded so weak. “Father, don’t be angry, I didn’t mean to make you angry, I just had to. I had to try, I knew it could work, I knew it.”_ _

__“Damian,” Bruce whispered, his hand on his son’s shoulder, but he was looking at Hal, and Jason knew he was running the quick calculus, trying to figure out what al-Ghul trick this was._ _

__“Hey,” Hal said. His voice sounded as weak as Damian’s, and Jason could feel the adrenaline rushing out of him too, leaving his knees wobbly. “Hey. It’s me. It’s. . . it’s me.”_ _

__Bruce was still just staring at him. And then he was back to looking at Damian. He bent to his son, hands on his shoulders. His gaze was penetrating. “You lied to me,” he said. “You manipulated a power you barely understand, for a purpose whose ends you could not foresee. You not only deceived me, you acted with reckless disregard for your own safety and that of everyone around you.”_ _

__“I know,” Damian said, his gaze as steady as Bruce’s._ _

__“You knew about this,” Bruce said, and now he was looking at Hal. “About what he is. . . capable of.”_ _

__“Yeah,” Hal said. “I did. I figured. . . I figured that was a conversation for him to have with you.”_ _

__“Oh did you now. You’ve spent most of the past year explaining my son to me, but when it comes to something like this, you suddenly decide you just won’t mention that to me?”_ _

__“Now hey wait up—”_ _

__“Did you ever stop to think what the cost to him might be, of exercising powers he did not fully understand and clearly cannot fully control? Or did his safety not figure into your plans to make yourself look as heroic as possible, by a sacrificial death that you relied on a twelve-year-old to help undo?”_ _

__“What the _what?_ ” Hal said. “You think I _planned_ this? Are you fucking _shitting_ me?”_ _

__“You were willing to sacrifice my son, in a gamble to do what? To once again burnish your reputation at the expense of the actual work of others? Or as usual had you not even thought that far ahead?”_ _

__“You wanna fucking shut your mouth? How the fuck was I supposed to know what Damian was gonna do, all I ever saw was he healed a _rodent_ , okay, and forgive me for not running to you to talk about it, because it’s always gone really fucking well any time I’ve ever tried to talk to you about any of your kids, you’re what I would call real receptive on that one, but if you think I would ever, _ever_ put Damian or anyone in this family at risk – Jesus Christ, how could you even fucking _think_ that??”_ _

__“Maybe because of a history of you failing to think thirty seconds beyond what is most convenient for you at any given moment?”_ _

__“Oh yeah? Kind of like the history of you being an unbelievable fucking douchenozzle to anyone who ever dares make the mistake of giving a shit about you? And your whole life is arranged for the greater convenience of Bruce fucking Wayne, so let’s not lecture me about convenient, but while we’re on that word, it was _convenient_ for me to die, are you _shitting me right now??_ Like dying was part of my master plan, are you _high_ right now?”_ _

__“Of course I would never accuse you of having a plan, Lantern, much less following it through!”_ _

__They looked like they were about an inch and a half from actual murder, and Jason did not at all like the look of Hal’s clenched fist. “Wow,” Jason said. “There is train wreck, and then there is you two, what the actual fuck.”_ _

__“This doesn’t concern you,” Bruce said, still glaring at Hal, his jaw so tight Jason was amazed he could even form words._ _

__“Riiiight,” Jason said. “I just spent the last two hours of my life waist deep in a fucking grave, which for five dollars I’d shove you both back in plus rent the backhoe to cover you, but what does this have to do with me.”_ _

__“It’s all right, Father,” Damian said, and his voice was sounding stronger now. He pulled at Bruce’s hand. “It’s all right,” he repeated. “I don’t have those powers any more, you won’t have to worry about it any more. I knew it would use up all of my strength to do that, if it worked at all. I can feel it in me. It’s gone now, and I’m just—I’m just like everyone else now.”_ _

__Bruce bent down to his son again, running a hand through his sweaty hair, stroking his pale face. “No,” he murmured. “Whatever else is true, I promise you it’s not that.”_ _

__“My God,” came the voice at the gate, and Alfred was standing there, staring at Hal. “I heard—I saw the green light at the house, and I thought—I didn’t know what to think, but I came as quick as I could, and—what in God’s name is happening?”_ _

__“A lot,” Hal sighed. “And also hey Alfred, I’m not dead as it turns out, and Damian has probably not told you about being a walking resurrection stone, and in case this needs clearing up I was not somehow planning to be jump-started by twelve-year-old Jesus here, but also, could I maybe have something to drink? Because I am—” And he put out a hand like he was trying to lean on something, and swayed._ _

__“Hal,” Bruce said, grabbing him before he toppled._ _

__“’M all right,” he murmured. “Just having kind of a night. Still up for more fighting, though, but maybe we could sit down first.”_ _

__“Jason,” Bruce said. “Take Damian back up to the house. Alfred, he’s going to need medical attention. Start with his vitals, but we’ll also need bloodwork, and rehydration. Keep him lying down. I’ll be there in just a minute.”_ _

__“Of course, sir,” Alfred said, and Jason took Damian’s hand._ _

__“Come on, kid,” he said. For once, Damian went with him willingly, not protesting at all. He probably understood exactly how close Jason was to murdering him right now. What a fucking family. What a fucking goddamn family._ _


	19. Chapter 19

“Can you walk?” Bruce said, and Hal shook his head. 

“Probably not. . . just yet,” he said. “Lemme sit for a minute.” And he leaned for a minute against a low headstone. Who knew who the hell’s grave he was resting on. He looked around him.

“So. . . it worked,” he said. “I mean, obviously, I guess. Parallax is. . . gone?”

“He is.”

“How long ago?”

“Ten days.”

Hal felt another wave of dizziness at that, and he had to sit. Ten days. Jesus Christ. He looked at Bruce then, really looked at him. “You don’t—you don’t look so great,” Hal said. 

“Well, things have been busy, I’ve had some late nights at the office.”

“Right,” Hal said. He lifted his hand, looked at the ring on it. Clenched and unclenched his fist. “My ring is still here. Ten days, I would have thought. . . I mean, I was really dead, right? You checked?”

“Yes, Hal, I checked. I figured that when the back of your skull had separated and fallen into my lap and your brains were soaking my pants, ‘really dead’ might be an accurate diagnosis.”

Hal was silent. He stared at his ring. “Maybe this is dead,” he said. “Maybe this is the dream.” He looked at Bruce, who was still staring at him, and, he knew, still assessing behind those iceberg eyes. “Of course, if it was a dream, would I really have you being such an unbelievable asshole to me five seconds into it? Wouldn’t I be dreaming a better version of you, instead of the one that seriously believes it was part of my grand scheme to endanger a twelve-year-old’s life to make myself look good?”

“I never said that.”

“You—oh my fucking God. You _literally_ said _exactly_ that. About six seconds ago, in fact.”

“Mm,” Bruce said. 

“Bruce. I did not want this, you know that. You look at me and tell me you know that. You fucking look at me.”

But he was, was the thing. He hadn’t stopped looking at Hal. Studying him, but not really looking at him. Eyes flicking over his face, around and back again. Observing him.

“You don't believe it’s me, do you,” Hal said quietly. 

“I don’t exactly know what you are.”

Hal studied his knotted hands. “Would I be wearing this ring,” he said. “Would the ring have come to me if it wasn’t me?”

“That’s a fair point.”

Hal shut his eyes. Almost he was afraid to open them again, in case all this wasn’t real. It felt like waking up, though, not like a dream. Like something was slipping away from him, something his brain kept trying to hold onto – like remembering wisps and fragments of a dream, and then feeling it slip out of your grasp. There was something, something was there. It hadn’t been nothingness. “You,” he said.

He turned and looked at Bruce. “You,” he said again. “I. . . remember you. In my dream, you were there. You were. . . no, it doesn’t make sense, why would you be tearing apart my bathroom? But in my dream, that’s what I saw. Or maybe I was there? I don’t. . . what a weird thing to dream.” 

Bruce reached for him then – a hand that touched his face, hesitantly. Bruce was frowning, but he knew that frown. “You,” Bruce said, brushing a thumb across his eyebrows, down his cheekbone. 

“Yeah,” Hal said. “Me, baby.” And then Bruce had seized him – seizing was really what it was, not an embrace, not anything normal like that, of course not, why would Bruce ever do anything normal. He was shaking, just a slight shivering in all his limbs, and at first Hal thought it was him, that he was the one shaking, but then he knew it was Bruce, and his chest broke open. 

“Baby,” he whispered, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t want—”

But Bruce was shushing him, Bruce was holding him, pressing every bit of them as close together as possible, and maybe Hal was the one shaking after all. Bruce’s mouth seized his, and Hal kissed back as well as he was able, holding Bruce’s head with clumsy fingers, tasting him – that, _that_ was life, that taste right there of the corner of Bruce’s mouth, and he dove in, determined to find more of it, and Bruce’s mouth opened to his, Bruce did that thing that always made Hal so hot for him where he went kind of boneless and melted into Hal, where he tipped his head back and just let Hal take him, let him do whatever he wanted. 

Hal stopped, and looked at Bruce’s beautiful face. Bruce’s eyes fluttered open. “Did lots of people come?” Hal said.

“Did—what?” Bruce said hoarsely.

“To my funeral. Did lots of people come? I would understand if they couldn’t, I just thought, ten days, that’s plenty of time for people to try and make it. It’s not like it’s a big deal, I was just curious.”

“Oh my God,” Bruce said. “It is you.” 

“You don’t have to be hurtful, it’s a natural question, I was just wondering if—” But Bruce was back on him, kissing him so roughly now it was almost bruising, and he was shaking again and—no, he was laughing. 

“You,” Bruce said, still laughing, and Christ, how could he have forgotten how beautiful Bruce was when he was laughing. How could that be a thing that existed in the universe, the small lines around those incredible eyes, the twist of Bruce’s beautiful mouth. Hal kissed him back, even harder, just to taste it some more, and now he was laughing too. They were laughing like loons and kissing each other in a graveyard like fucking idiots, and Hal brought his hands around Bruce’s waist and tugged him in closer. 

“Mm maybe not,” Bruce murmured in his ear. 

“Why baby, come on,” he murmured back, letting his hands wander some more. Bruce grabbed his hand and held it.

“Because this is actually my mother’s grave we’re on, and while I’m pretty dark, that may be too goth even for me.”

Hal couldn’t stop laughing then, and Bruce tipped his forehead against Hal’s and laughed too. “I’m completely sure she’s cool with it,” Hal said. “It’s all coming back to me, she specifically said for me to tell you that you should bone me whenever I wanted it.”

“Oh is that so,” Bruce said, and kissed him again. He was controlling the pace of the kissing now, and Hal gave into it, let Bruce slow their kisses, let him take his time.

“I’m sorry,” Hal whispered, so quiet he thought maybe Bruce wouldn’t even hear it, but Bruce whispered back, “I know,” and kissed him some more. And after a while they weren’t kissing, but Bruce was just resting there against him. Hal held him while he breathed. It was enough to be quiet together, to re-learn breathing together.

“Hey,” Hal whispered after a while. “It was a nice touch, what you put me in. My clothes, I mean. I’m guessing that was you.” He hadn’t even realized until a few minutes ago what it was he was wearing – that he wasn’t in the suit you might expect, but in his flight suit and leather jacket. 

“Hey,” Hal said again, but Bruce still didn’t answer. And Bruce was feeling awfully heavy in his arms. “Hey. Are you. . .” He tried shifting him a little. 

“Oh my God,” he said. “Oh my fucking God. You’re asleep. You are actually and genuinely asleep. You fell asleep on me. Literally on me.”

He managed to shift him a bit so he wasn’t cutting off all circulation in his arm. He laughed again, but just a little, so as not to wake Bruce. “Baby,” he whispered. No movement. Bruce was completely gone. He leaned back a bit against the stone, and cradled him better. For Bruce to fall asleep like this. . . the man must not have slept for days. For ten days, in fact. He tried to imagine what those ten days would have been like for him, had he been the one to watch Bruce shoot himself in the head, and he flinched at it. He couldn’t look, couldn’t imagine. So he gave him a few minutes of collapse there, in the quiet and dark by an open empty grave, but he knew that soon Damian and Alfred would be needing them both, so he shifted him. 

“Hey,” he murmured. “We gotta get to the cave. And then we can sleep, I promise.”

“Okay,” Bruce slurred, but his eyes didn’t open. He was clearly not going anywhere. 

Hal settled back against Martha Wayne’s gravestone, and cradled her son’s body. He was just sitting here, newly resurrected and all, hanging out about five feet from his literal and actual grave, while Bruce took a nap. 

“Okay,” Hal sighed, resigning himself. “Okay. Well, this is maybe the most Wayne thing ever. This is so fucking weird.”

There was light coming from somewhere, a soft light that enveloped them. He hadn’t noticed it before. It was coming from his ring – just a soft glow that was giving him enough light to see, but he could feel it soaking in under his skin, too. Finishing what Damian had begun. 

“Go on and sleep, baby,” he whispered. “We got time.”

* * *

“Are you fucking kidding me right now?” Hal yelled, rising to his feet with the rest of the crowd. “Ah, come on, how blind do you have to be?!”

“You’re spilling your beer,” Damian said.

“I mean come on, did you see that? Gutierrez was clearly safe, everyone over here saw it! Goddamn ump is blind,” Hal grumbled, but he sat back down. The stands around them did not subside that easily, though – several people were throwing empty beer cups, and shouting colorful curses down at the field. 

“I don’t understand why they allow people to yell at the umpire like that,” Damian said. “If I were umpire I would have them all thrown out of the stadium. Why on earth does he let them?”

“I mean he doesn’t _let_ them, you can’t arrest people for yelling at baseball. Yelling at the ump is part of the whole baseball experience.”

“Lantern, you’ve been saying for the last hour and a half that everything from the highly infectious urinals to the overpriced pretzels is part of the baseball experience. I’m beginning to think this whole sports phenomenon is just another example of social contagion, in which a group of people convince themselves they are having a good time while in fact suffering unimaginably.”

“Suffering unimaginably,” Hal said, taking a bite off his seven-dollar pretzel. “Give me a break. Come on, yelling at people and eating terrible food is how you have a good time, back me up here, Bruce.” 

On the other side of Damian, Bruce just shrugged and went back to staring lazily at the field. He had an aisle seat, and he was stretching his legs out, a cap pulled down enough to shadow his face – to keep from being recognized, he had said, but to make it easier to nap, Hal suspected. 

“Why in God’s name are we doing this again?” Bruce had said earlier today, grumbling as he poked through stacks of clothes looking for a suitably nondescript T shirt to wear.

“Because I promised Damian. Come on, I can’t break a promise. He’ll be heartbroken.”

“Lies,” Bruce said, pulling out a gray shirt that looked exactly fucking identical to every other gray shirt he had been looking at for the last fifteen minutes. “Damian’s not the one who cares about going to this game.”

“All right fine, look, I didn’t wanna say it but you’ve forced my hand. You’re a bad father, all right? There, I said it. You’re the worst. You kid is about to turn thirteen, and you’ve never once taken him to a game of any kind? I don’t even know what kind of child brutality that is, but he’s gonna have at least one person in this house who cares about his actual education.”

“Very touching. You don’t expect us to stay for this whole thing, do you? Because surely we can slip away along about hour seven of the world’s most interminable sporting event. Besides, there’s no point in my going in the first place. Damian would much rather go with just you.”

“Yes there is a point, and the point is that we go as a family, all right? Just you, me, and the one chance you’ve got left to launch a semi-normal adult on the universe, which I for one am not gonna let you screw up. This is about family time.”

“Meaning you already asked Dick and he couldn’t go.”

“Yeah, that too. And Tim made up some painfully transparent lie about studying. But that’s okay, I’ve got Jason down for next week and the hockey playoffs in Metropolis.”

“Why couldn’t I have taken hockey? At least something happens in hockey. Give me hockey, and Jason can take baseball.”

“No can do, Jason’s out of town this week, so baseball is you.”

“Out of town,” Bruce grumbled, peeling off his gray shirt and replacing it with yet another identical gray shirt. “I know exactly where he is, and I’ve already taken steps to assure that his little drug kingpin assassination attempt does not go as planned. That’s what I need to be concentrating on this afternoon. But by all means, let’s go to a baseball game instead of doing any actual work.”

Hal tossed his jacket at him. “Get in the car, princess.”

But for all his grousing, he knew Bruce was actually having a good time. He could see it in the occasional sidelong glances at Damian, and the way he watched Hal explaining the intricacies of baseball, with a small smile lurking around the corners of his mouth before he buried it in his beer. “Father, which sports did you play?” Damian asked, turning to him at some point in the second inning.

“Yes, Bruce, tell us. Which sports did you play?”

“I don’t really remember,” Bruce said, squinting at the field. 

“What your dad means is, he played squash.”

“Lacrosse,” Bruce murmured. 

“Literally the same thing.”

“What’s lacrosse?”

“Hockey for rich people,” Hal said. “Don’t worry about it, kid, you’re never gonna play lacrosse.”

“Now wait just a minute,” Bruce said. “The Native American origins of the game of lacrosse make it one of the most—”

“Oh yeah? How many Native Americans were on the lacrosse team at Groton? Seriously, just ballpark me. Like if you went to school with even one Native kid, I will eat this foam finger right now, I swear to God I will.”

“You think I can’t possibly have any knowledge about sports because the school I went to was expensive?”

“Yes that is exactly what I think. Rich kids don’t play actual sports. Look, a real sport involves the very real possibility of physical damage, and maybe even brain damage. No rich parents are gonna let their little gold-plated babies get their brains knocked out of their head, that shit is just obvious.”

“Do you mean like that man there?” Damian said, pointing at the fight that had broken out on the field. 

“Holy shit, what the hell!” Hal yelled, getting to his feet again, along with half the stands. “Did you _see_ that? Aw come on, are you kidding me – you’re throwing _him_ out? He wasn’t the one who started it!”

“THAT IS A FLAGRANT INJUSTICE!” Damian shouted, leaping to his feet beside Hal. “THIS IS THE GROSSEST MALFEASANCE!”

“Okay, nice try kid, A for effort, settle down there,” Hal said, clapping him on the shoulder. Bruce was quietly laughing underneath his cap, and Hal was glad for the distraction of the fight, because he had caught the way Bruce’s head turned quickly aside when he had made that remark about brains getting knocked out of their head. Sometimes he forgot that he was not the one who had suffered, and what it had been like for Bruce. For him, it was all some dream that had only been half-real; for Bruce, he knew, it was a nightmare that continually threatened to tug him back under. 

“Why don’t I go get us some more of those twenty-dollar hot dogs,” Bruce said, slipping out from his seat. 

“Extra mustard,” Hal called after him. He eased himself back into his seat. He had been a little too enthusiastic with the leaping and yelling, and his muscles were paying for it. He tried to hide his wince, but he knew Damian saw it. The crowd around them was subsiding now, disgruntled fans still giving desultory shouts, and a few down at the front still tossing beers. Damian was regarding him gravely.

“Are you all right?” he said.

“Yeah kid, I’m fine. It’s okay.” His cane was resting on the seat beside them, but he hadn’t worn a brace – it would have been a pain to manage on all the stairs. He was starting to regret that decision a little. 

Damian looked thoughtful. “It’s my fault,” he said.

“Your fault? What is?”

“That I wasn’t able to fix you. I don’t understand it. I’ve thought about it a great deal, and I still don’t understand.”

“Kid—what the hell are you talking about? Fix me? Fix me for what?”

“When I brought you back to life,” he said matter-of-factly. “I thought that would fix everything that was wrong. I can’t understand why it didn’t, except possibly I wasn’t powerful enough. Or maybe it’s just that I didn’t know enough about my powers to control them the way I ought to have. I’m sorry about it, Lantern. I really did think it would work.”

“Kid,” Hal said again, because he didn’t know what else to say. It kind of knocked the wind out of him. “Holy Christ. This is. . . this is the thing you’ve been worrying about all this time?”

“It’s a reasonable thing to wonder about, especially considering—”

“No it isn’t,” he said vehemently. “Kid, no it isn’t. Did it ever occur to you that maybe you didn’t fix me because there wasn’t anything wrong with me in the first place?”

Damian frowned at him, clearly not getting it. “I have MD,” Hal said. “That’s not something wrong with me, that’s just part of who I am. It’s not good or bad, it’s just me.”

Damian was still looking unconvinced. A little hard to separate that from his normal skeptical expression, but Hal practically had a PhD now in teasing out human emotion from a Wayne countenance. “Okay,” Hal said. “Think of it this way. Remember the very important educational film we watched last week?”

“Transformers Age of Extinction?”

“No, not that one, the other one. It’s like at the end of Shrek, when Fiona gets transformed into a beautiful princess?”

“But she doesn’t. It’s a story about failing to better oneself by consorting with people who are beneath you.”

“Which it is _not_ , it’s a story about how she’s expecting the ogre part of her to go away, but it doesn’t, because it’s not some hideous disease, it’s just who she is, all right?”

“Marchand’s Syndrome is a hideous disease,” Damian said quietly. “And I should have been able to make it go away.”

Around them the stands were erupting in more hoots and calls for the umpire to sodomize himself with a broken baseball bat, but Hal and Damian sat in silence. “Yeah,” Hal said after a minute. “I’m not gonna lie, Marchand’s sucks. I’m not trying to make it sound like it doesn’t. But better or worse, it’s part of me. I’m not broken. This is just me – the good parts as well as the bad parts. And sometimes it’s gonna suck worse than others. But I’m not some guy who had something terrible happen to him one day. I’m me, and the MD is part of me. And yeah, maybe we should have talked about this before, and I am so fucking sorry I haven’t said this to you before, but thank you for what you did. I mean, it was stupid, and you never in a thousand million years should’ve done it, and I’m gonna be kicking your ass about it until I die for real this time. But I can’t pretend I’m not glad about it. Thank you for making me alive, kid.”

“It was what you were owed,” he said.

“What I was _owed_? Come on, that doesn’t even make sense, you can’t—”

“It does,” Damian interrupted. “You made him alive. So I made you alive. It was only fair.”

Hal sat there, struck dumb. The things that came out of Damian’s mouth sometime. He didn’t trust himself to speak at first, his throat felt so tight. “So,” he tried, after a minute or so. “I ah, guess this is your way of saying we’ve got your blessing, huh?”

Damian grimaced. “Romantic attachments are pointless,” he said. “Needless distractions. But I suppose you are moderately less distracting for him than other choices.”

“Listen to you, you are such a little asshole.” Damian smirked at him, and he pushed at the kid’s head, and the smirk became a grin. 

“I’m not watching any more Transformers movies, though,” Damian said, as Bruce sat down heavily in his seat, handing Hal’s hot dog down to him and tossing a cap onto Damian’s head. 

“Here,” he said, “I bought you a souvenir.” 

“Hey, where’s mine?” Hal said.

“I only bought him the hat so he could hide behind it every time you wave that ridiculous foam monstrosity like an idiot. Please stop, is your need for attention that pathological? For God’s sake, if that jumbotron puts us up on the screen I am going to take that foam finger and insert it where it will require surgical removal.”

“What’s wrong with your pants?” Hal said, squinting at him. 

“Some drunken idiot decided to throw his beer at the trash can, which turned out not to be a trash can but my pants. I’m freezing, and I smell like every bad decision I made my sophomore year of college. Can we please go home now?”

“Come on babe, you can make it. Only seven more innings to go, you’re gonna love this.”

“Why would a merciful God make this my life,” Bruce sighed, settling deeper into his seat.

“Just lucky I guess,” Hal said with a grin, and Bruce snorted, but met his eyes above Damian’s hat. Hal’s grin became softer, and he felt such a surge of pure gratitude to the universe that his chest felt like it might burst. And maybe Bruce was feeling something of the same, from the soft brush of his eyes against Hal’s.

“All right,” Hal said, clapping a hand on Damian’s back. “Third inning, here we go.”

* * *

It was surprising to him, how long it took them to find the place where they had been. It was weird, because to Hal those ten days had felt like nothing – like literal nothing. But they hadn’t been nothing to Bruce. He had lived through them, and faced down the barrel of a lifetime without Hal, and Hal could feel that difference, for a long time afterward. Bruce had traveled a lifetime of grief in those ten days, and there were some things Hal could only guess at. 

At first, Bruce had been on autopilot: get Damian checked out, get him checked out, make sure everyone was safe. Bruce had run endless tests on him, for about twelve solid hours after he had come back. Hal had finally had to grab his hand and say, “Enough,” before Bruce would stop. 

He had slept in Bruce’s bed that night, in Bruce’s room, which was something they had not done a lot of. The carriage house was just easier, because it was more private. But he didn’t protest when Bruce took him upstairs, and he fell into bed there, and Bruce crawled in beside him, throwing a heavy arm across him, and was almost instantly asleep again. If he had thought Bruce was bad before, about letting him have enough air to breathe at night, this was like making out with a boa constrictor. Bruce kept his arms wrapped so tight around him that trying to go to the bathroom was an extended negotiation with Bruce’s fifty-pound legs, which were pinning him.

He slipped back into bed and found Bruce’s eyes awake, and those arms ready to enfold him again. “You’re shivering,” Bruce whispered. 

“Yeah, I’m not—temperature regulation is not going so great,” Hal whispered back, and Bruce quickly rose, bringing back more quilts to wrap him. He wished he hadn’t started shaking. 

“Let me start a fire,” Bruce said, and Hal realized he had been clutching onto him. Bruce’s body put out heat like a furnace. 

“No, stay,” he murmured, and Bruce wrapped his body around him tighter. It wasn’t really a back-from-the-grave thing; sometimes the Marchand’s fucked with his regulatory systems, and he just got so damn cold. Bruce had long practice in waking up to Hal shivering in the night, and had gotten to the point where he didn’t even wake—would just pull him in closer and curl around him, sharing his heat.

“I could get Alfred to come light a fire,” Bruce said, nuzzling at his neck. Hal cocked a brow.

“What, like in here? Just call Alfred to come light a fire while I lie here in bed with you?”

"Mm,” Bruce said, his lips brushing against Hal’s shoulder. “Alfred and I have actually reached an understanding.”

“No way. You outed us to Alfred without talking to me about it?”

“You were dead, I assumed you wouldn’t mind.”

“I’m just saying we could have talked about it first.”

“It was not exactly news to him. Come on, you need a fire, shift over and I’ll get one started.”

“It’s better now,” Hal murmured, drifting back to sleep. He woke close to dawn to find that Bruce had in fact extricated and built that fire, and the room was toasty – actually it was probably suffocatingly hot, to Bruce – and Bruce was still wrapped around him. 

He rolled over to find Bruce was already awake, and Bruce’s mouth met his, and they were kissing tentatively, quietly, re-discovering things. It was not their usual. Bruce was almost hesitant with him. “What’s wrong baby,” Hal whispered in his ear.

“I’m afraid.”

“I’m here, I’m not going anywhere.”

“Not afraid of that. Afraid that at some point my mind snapped the leash, and I’m making this all up.”

“Yeah, me too,” Hal said, and Bruce kissed him harder then, hard enough to bruise them both, and maybe there was teeth there too, but the pain of it felt like something real, like being finally and really awake. 

“I need something,” Bruce said.

“Anything. Tell me.”

“I need you to fuck me.”

“You got it.” And he understood the part Bruce wasn’t saying, too. He knew Bruce needed it rough, maybe rougher than they had been before. That moment of pain had felt bracing, like it was cutting through the dream-fog, and maybe Bruce needed that too. So he fucked Bruce rough that first night, fucked him while Bruce made small noises that might have been pain or might have been pleasure, he didn’t know. Fucked him while Bruce choked and writhed underneath him. “Take it,” he growled in Bruce’s ear, and Bruce gasped and shook. His own orgasm whited out his brain. He came buried so deep in Bruce, his balls aching with it. 

“God I just wanna fuck you forever,” he gasped, and Bruce laced fingers in his, arched up for his mouth, and Hal just kept fucking him. Afterward they didn’t say anything, but they didn’t go back to sleep, either – just lay there intertwined, staring off into their memories. Was there something else he could have, should have done, about Parallax? Maybe if he had gone off, away from the Manor, away from here, back when he had first wanted to. Maybe he had miscalculated somewhere. But every time he ran the numbers, he came up with the same answer – that only his death would have severed that bond forever. Maybe he had known that all along. Maybe he had been running from that for a long time. There had been no other play, and he knew it. 

“You warm now?” Bruce husked, and Hal wrapped himself around him, inhaling the scent at the back of his lover’s neck. He loved the back of Bruce’s neck. It was all those soft vulnerable places that he couldn’t get enough of.

“Yeah,” he sighed. “I am. Listen, you still wanna get married?”

Bruce shifted in his arms, re-settling. “Possibly. Not if you’re going to go killing yourself every so often.”

“Last time, babe, I swear. But we’re still on, right?”

Bruce turned all the way over and studied him, frowning. “Of course,” he said. “That’s something you had to ask?”

“No, I just—I was just wondering if maybe we could still do that, only. . . I dunno, maybe a little different than how you were thinking it might be.”

“How many different ways are there to be married?”

“Not different ways to _be_ married, but lots of different ways to _get_ married, is what I mean. And I just. . . I dunno. Clark and Lois’s wedding was beautiful, and it was a great party—”

“Which you didn’t attend.”

“But my point is, a wedding like that, it takes a long time to plan, and there’s all this. . . this preparation that goes into something like that, and the truth is, I really don’t wanna wait that long.”

“Couldn’t agree more.”

“But like, I _really_ don’t want to wait. As in, I’m thinking we could do this soon. Like maybe this afternoon kind of soon.”

“You’re dead,” Bruce said.

“I think we have just proven how I am not.”

“Legally, I mean. That’s going to take at least a couple of days to undo, before you could get a marriage license. The state of New York has relaxed many of its strictures around the granting of marriage licenses, but ‘legally alive’ is one they’re holding fast on.”

“Oh. Right. Forgot about that. I don’t guess I could just show up at the DMV and say jk, not dead now?”

“I think it’s a little more complicated than that. But I’ll call my lawyers, and see if we can move this along quickly.”

“Your lawyers,” he said, contemplating the plural. “You keep an army of those?”

“I do. And it’s going to be your army too, soon enough.”

“Right. I keep forgetting how filthy fucking rich you are. I should probably sign one of those pre-nups, huh.”

“Not necessary. I also keep an army of ninjas, so I’m not worried about you divorcing me.”

Hal gave a soft laugh, and rolled onto his back, pulling Bruce with him. “Maybe we can just spend a day or so like this, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Bruce said, brushing his mouth against Hal’s jaw. Hal’s eyes started to drift shut, but then he sat bolt upright.

“Shit,” he said. “Oh shit. I have to – where the fuck is my phone? I completely forgot, shouldn’t I be telling people I’m not dead?”

“Already done,” Bruce murmured. “Lie back down.”

“Wait wait wait, what do you mean, ‘already done’? What the fuck, you already told Barry? And Oliver, and Dinah? Everybody??”

“I did, while you were undergoing testing.”

“You called them?”

“I texted.”

Hal blinked at him. “You _texted_ them. Just out of curiosity, what the fuck did that text even look like?”

“I got right to the point. Don’t worry, if it’s a dramatic resurrection scene you’re hoping for, I think you can still cash in. I’m pretty sure they all think I’m drunk, delusional, or off my medication, and to be fair I’ve been all three of those things for a bit now. So I didn’t pre-empt your moment, believe me.”

“Okay, good,” Hal said, lying back down. He settled back in the crook of Bruce’s arm, draping it around his shoulder. He let Bruce go back to sleep, but he didn’t sleep. Wasn’t that sleepy, the truth was. He felt like he had been doing nothing but sleeping. He waited until Bruce’s breathing deepened and evened out, and then he propped on an elbow and just watched him sleep. The dawn was slipping through the heavy curtains now, and he watched the soft gray light on Bruce’s beautiful face.

He would have been happy to lie there all day just watching him if he hadn’t gotten hungry. And not hungry in some ‘a sandwich would be nice’ kind of way, but hungry in the ‘my stomach is going to collapse in on itself if I don’t eat RIGHT FUCKING NOW kind of way.’ He slipped out of bed and rummaged in the closet for some of Bruce’s clothes (no way was he putting back on the clothes he had been fucking buried in, thank you) and headed down to the kitchen to forage for something.

He stopped off at Damian’s room on his way, and quietly opened the door. The room was so vast it was hard sometimes to find the kid, but there was a pile of blankets on the bed with a tousled dark head sticking out of them. Hal crept in and bent beside him. The kid was sleeping peacefully, but Hal watched him breathe a little, thinking about those heart-stopping seconds when he had felt Damian’s still, unmoving chest beneath his fingers. He bent down and grazed a kiss on top of that head, which would never in a million years have been allowed if Damian were conscious, but when you had just come back from the dead, you got to take liberties. 

He made his quiet way down to the kitchen, and it was early enough that he was the only one up, so he made himself some toast and jam and stood there at the kitchen sink eating it and looking out on the lawns below, and the quiet of the house, and the utter normalcy of just standing there and eating toast, filled him with a sense of peace. 

“I can do better than toast, you know,” said Alfred’s voice behind him.

“Hey,” Hal said. “Didn’t want to wake anybody up. I’m good.”

“That may be, but I’m English, and we express our emotions through inanimate objects, so I am going to cook you breakfast. I presume waffles with clotted cream and elderberry syrup would be acceptable?”

“I mean, I’m never gonna say no to that,” Hal said with a grin. 

“Excellent, sir. I’m assuming Master Bruce will not be joining us, so perhaps I shall just lay a smaller table in here? Master Damian is still asleep, and I thought I might bring him a tray upstairs, to make sure he continues to rest today.”

“Sounds good. Can I help cook?”

Alfred cocked a critical head at him. “I don’t know, sir. Can you?”

“I can follow directions. Where’s the waffle mix at?”

Alfred sighed. “Work to do here, I see.”

* * *

After breakfast that first morning, he went down to the carriage house.

It was weird how normal everything felt – how completely like he had just stepped out for a second. He knew it hadn’t been that way for everyone around him, but he couldn’t erase the part of him that wanted to say _will everyone just relax, it was not a big deal._ But the part that wanted to say that died, when he stood in the carriage house and looked at the walls. 

It was Damian’s work, unmistakably. It was breathtaking, and heartbreaking, and it kicked the wind right out of him. He sat there on the floor and stared at it, and just took it in. 

There hadn’t been another play, he knew that. But sometimes even the right play ended up destroying the same people you were trying to protect. And to see that. . . it was funny, but along with the _it was not a big deal_ voice was another one, that said _you weren’t that big a deal._ The voice that said, sure, people might be sad when he died, but not _that_ sad. It wasn’t like he was some crucial irreplaceable part of anyone’s life. He wasn’t someone like Bruce, or Clark, or Oliver even. He wasn’t someone whose absence would be felt along a thousand fault lines and ripples, like a hole blown in the universe – not like people who had families and huge networks of friends. He wasn’t one of _those_ people. 

He sat cross-legged on the floor for hours, staring at the welter of wings and the green light that surrounded him on all sides. He had never thought of himself as one of those people, but somehow he had become one of those people, when he wasn’t looking. Somehow he had acquired a family, and the ripples of his life extended far beyond his own calculations. He had sat down on this floor one person, and when he rose – stiffly, slowly – hours later, he was another, a person whose ties to the universe around him were different than he had thought. It made it easier, somehow, to believe in Bruce. Because Parallax had been right. That motherfucker had been right about more than one thing, when he had taken all the poison in Hal’s head and spat it back at him – that Bruce only loved him because he was broken, that that was his only value. He saw that now for the lie that it was, and believed – truly and maybe for the first time believed – that Bruce loved him as he loved Bruce, and that was all there was to it. A gift of the universe, a gift that couldn’t be explained or deserved, but only lived up to. The wings of all the birds on all the walls around him overlapped and intertwined in ways past teasing out, and that was him, too. That was all of them.

He went into the bathroom, and stood there staring at the destruction. So he hadn’t dreamed it, after all. There had been something there, after he had died, something that had allowed him to see this. He ran a careful finger along the jagged porcelain edge of the broken sink, and his heart ached and broke open, thinking of Bruce’s rage and grief. What his own would have been. 

They did get married, because Bruce wasn’t kidding about his army of lawyers being able to fix anything within forty-eight hours. He was legally alive again with very little trouble on his part, and in possession of a marriage license, and their wedding was maybe not the elaborate party Bruce had wanted it to be, but five quiet minutes in a county clerk’s office was enough for Hal. 

“We’ll need witnesses,” Bruce said. “They can probably find someone, but it might be nice to bring our own. If that’s something you felt comfortable with.”

“Sure,” Hal said. “It’s not like I’m trying to keep this a big secret, I fully intend to staple a picture of my dick to your forehead. Call anyone you want.”

“Good, because I already told Clark to meet us at the courthouse at one.”

“Oh okay, thanks for checking with me. Do I get to ask somebody?”

“Anyone you want.”

He couldn’t decide, though, whether he should call Barry or Oliver, and then decided he didn’t want to deal with the butthurt from either one of them about not being chosen, and he didn’t want both of them, because then the whole thing would feel a lot less private and just for the two of them. So he did the thing he should have thought to do in the first place, and knocked on the door of the small study off the breakfast room.

“Can I come in?” he said, and Alfred looked up from his accounts.

“Of course Master Harold, how are you feeling?”

“Still pretty alive. You busy this afternoon?”

“Well I have the caterers at three. There’s another gala Friday next, I don’t know if Master Bruce mentioned it, and I’m already quite behind on preparations. I don’t know that I trust the catering company quite enough to leave them on their own. In my not inconsiderable experience, they require adult supervision. But I will have some spare moments here and there, what may I do for you?”

“Just wondering if you might like to come be my best man at the courthouse this afternoon.” 

Alfred pulled the glasses off his face and just stared at him. For once the man appeared to be speechless, so score one for the Lantern Corps. “Of course, sir,” he said hoarsely. He cleared his throat once or twice, and carefully cleaned his glasses and frowned at them as though they required his urgent attention. Then he rose, and Hal extended his hand to shake, but Alfred ignored the hand and pulled him into an embrace.

“Oh,” Hal said. “Okay. I thought the English only expressed their emotions through food?”

“There are exceptions,” Alfred said. 

The ceremony at the courthouse was everything Hal had hoped it would be – lowkey and private, and not for anybody else but them. Maybe it was because there were so many people who wanted a piece of Bruce, so many people who were owed a piece of Bruce. He belonged to his family, and to the League, and to Gotham, and to Wayne Industries, and to the tabloids and to about a gazillion other people. But when the doors were closed, he belonged only to Hal. When there were other people around, that was when he stopped being Hal’s. So he had wanted this to be just for them, in a quiet room.

When Alfred arrived, Bruce fixed his gaze on Hal, his brow arching precipitously. “You asked Alfred,” he said.

“I did.”

“You did.”

“Mm hm.” Alfred and Clark were busy over at the registrar’s desk, signing documents. Hal rocked back on his heels with a smug smile on his face.

“I don’t believe you,” Bruce said. “I’m never going to hear the end of this, that you were the one to ask him.”

Hal leaned in and whispered in his ear. “Who’s the favorite now, motherfucker.”

“You’re not getting laid tonight.”

“But I am getting waffles with elderberry syrup. I think I know the better deal when I see it.”

“Shall we get started?” the cheery clerk said to them, and Bruce was still glaring at him. He stood on Hal’s foot, hard, but Hal just laughed. Clark caught Hal’s eye and gave a little smirk, which was weird, because he didn’t know if that was because he had overheard their whole conversation, or if it was just meant to be a congratulatory smile. He never knew, with Clark, if Clark just pretended not to hear things, and how far he was expected to play along. Bruce’s friends were weird as fuck. 

They drove home in silence, because Hal was thinking about the carriage house. He had spent every night in Bruce’s room, this week, and the Manor itself was starting to feel more like home. Before, he had been worried about shit like that, about where they would live and what that would look like, but none of that seemed to matter anymore. Lots of shit that he had thought mattered did not, in fact.

“You all right?” Bruce said, as they were turning onto Bay Shore, and Hal roused.

“Yeah,” he said. 

“Tired?”

“Yeah, actually. I might need to lie down when we get home.”

“Sounds like a good plan for both of us.”

“I was also thinking,” Hal said, staring out the window. “About the carriage house.”

“What about it?”

“I had an idea about it, but I don’t know how you’re gonna feel about it. Something I want to do with it.”

“It’s your place, do whatever you want with it.”

“I’m thinking I want to turn it into an art studio.”

Bruce was quiet. “I know what you’re thinking,” Hal said. 

“No you don’t.”

“You’re thinking that Damian has lots more to concentrate on than his art, that he has extraordinary gifts and responsibilities, that he’s not just some ordinary kid, and I know all that, all right? But his art, that’s an extraordinary gift too. And just like he needs the cave and places where he can train the super freaky ninja part of himself, he also needs a place where he can train this other part of him, because he doesn’t have to be one or the other, he can be both. And if he had a place, it wouldn’t feel like his art was something he needed to keep hidden, or something that he worries will disappoint you. I just thought if he had a place, especially a place that has the best light on the whole damn property, a place that was a little distance from the house – I dunno, I just thought it would be good.”

Bruce pulled the car over onto the shoulder of the road, and they sat there. “Is this where you tell me to get out of the car?” Hal said. But Bruce was staring off into the distance.

“Do you think he feels I disapprove?” Bruce said, and Hal just stared at him. It was a genuine question. Bruce was genuinely asking him a question about his son, because he trusted Hal to know better than he would. _Don’t fuck this up,_ said the voice in his head.

“I think,” Hal said carefully, “that pleasing you is the one thing he wants more than anything in this world. And sometimes there are risks he doesn’t take, if he thinks there’s even a chance you might disapprove. So sometimes he doesn’t just need to be let alone to do his own shit, like most kids. Sometimes he needs to hear it straight from you, that something is okay. Especially if that thing is very different from your thing. Look, I’m not trying to be his dad. I know he’s got one of those, all right? This is just, what I see from over on the bleachers.” 

“We’re married now,” Bruce said.

“Um. . . yeah. That just sinking in? Hey, I want a car like this one. That’s the one thing I want, is a fancy fucking car. So I can drive to the Aldi’s, I guess, but whatever.”

“Buy yourself a car, what do I care. My point is, you’re no longer on the bleachers, you’re in the game. You have been for a long time. And I was wondering if you’d like to make that official.”

“Didn’t we just do that?”

“You did that with me, not with Damian. I’m trying to ask you if adoption is something you’d like to consider.” 

He felt like someone had punched him in the chest. “You don’t—you want—are you—do you mean that?”

Bruce turned to him. “I do,” he said, and it was like the _I do_ of the clerk’s office, his eyes just as level and unblinking. Hal struggled to swallow.

“If that’s something Damian would want,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to. . . I mean, he might not want that.”

“Well why don’t you ask him?”

Hal swallowed around the tight knot in his throat. “You would. . . do that,” he said.

“Give my son an excellent parent who loves him, and whom he loves? Damian is not my possession, he’s my child, and he deserves the best. And the best is you.”

Hal reached for Bruce’s hand, not trusting himself to speak. Bruce gripped his hand back, hard. He remembered that day at Gotham General, when he had gotten his brace, and come back to the car, and Bruce’s firm grip had been the anchor that had kept him sane and whole. “I’ll talk to him tonight,” Hal said, his throat still tight.

“Well you’ll have time to kill, what with sleeping on the sofa tonight.”

“Oh come on, you’re not still salty about Alfred. Look, the power move was there to be made, and I made it, all right? Don’t blame me because you fucked up.”

He did talk to Damian that night, haltingly, uncertainly. He didn’t know what the kid would think. He didn’t want him to think it was something he had to do, or that ‘no thanks’ was the wrong answer. Damian had the same gaze as his father – black eyes instead of blue, but just as unblinking, just as steady on you. “That would be acceptable,” he said, when Hal was finished.

“Acceptable,” Hal repeated. “ _Acceptable,_ what the fuck does that even mean? If you don’t want to, just say it, I don’t want you to feel like—” But then he saw Damian’s sly smirk of a grin, and he pushed at him. 

“You little shit,” he said, and Damian’s grin became wider. “You’re grounded until you’re fifteen.”

“You’re not my real father, you can’t tell me what to do.”

“See? We’ve got this down already, you and me.” And he pulled Damian into him, and Damian even allowed it, for about point-seven seconds. "You know what this means," Hal said. "I am for sure taking you to a baseball game. You're gonna learn about sports. You're gonna eat some shitty food and yell at the ump with all the rest of the peasants. It'll be great."

"I've changed my mind," Damian said.

"Too late, kid, no take-backs. It's for keeps," he said, but whatever touching moment they had just been about to have was destroyed by Titus bounding into the room, hotly pursued by a kitten roughly one-seventieth of his body mass, and then racing out the other door, the kitten closing the distance with murder in its eyes. There was a tremendous crash from the other room, and the sound of shattered porcelain. 

" _That bloody bell-end of a dog, I shall set fire to its bollocks if you don't get it out of here!"_ came Alfred's bellow down the hall, and Damian scrambled up, yelling "Don't hurt Titus, it's not his fault!!!" and Hal stretched out his legs on the newly-vacated sofa and pulled a cushion down over him for a nap, because it was going to be a long life, and he needed to rest up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This work has an epilogue, which can be found at [Laundry Day](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18266840/chapters/43226324).


End file.
